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The Puritan
Break an egg into a shaker and add three tablespoonfuls of cherry syrup, a dash of ginger extract, and a dash of acid phosphate. Shake, strain into a tall glass, and add a little cracked ice and soda water.
A soda-fountain egg drink from the temperance era. The mixing is trivial; the problem is the whole raw egg, which is shaken cold and served cold with no step that ever heats it.
- The raw egg is the reason to stopA whole shell egg goes into the shaker and into the glass. Nothing in the drink cooks it. Salmonella Enteritidis can be present inside an intact, clean egg, and a chilled drink is a hospitable place for it.
- Acid phosphate does not make it safeThe dash of acid phosphate is there for tartness and a dry finish, not for sanitation. Its contribution to the pH of a tall glass of soda water is nowhere near enough to inactivate pathogens, and the drink is consumed within minutes in any case.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a source that specifies pasteurized egg product or an egg-free build. Do not adapt the timings or proportions here in the hope of making the original version safe.
- Acid phosphateA solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, a common fixture at fountain counters of the period. It went out of general use mid-century but is made again for the cocktail trade; a "dash" means a few drops from a fountain bottle, on the order of an eighth to a quarter of a teaspoon.
- Ginger extractNot ground ginger and not modern ginger ale. Fountain ginger extract was an alcoholic tincture of ginger root used drop by drop. A ginger syrup or tincture is the nearest current equivalent, and it is stronger per drop than most people expect.
- Cherry syrupFountain cherry syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, considerably denser than most syrups sold today, flavoured and coloured. Three tablespoonfuls is a substantial dose of sugar, so a modern thin cherry syrup will read as weak by comparison.
- Soda water and the glassThe recipe specifies only a "tall glass" and gives no capacity. The soda is added last, after the strained egg and syrup and the cracked ice.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain, sold as much for nourishment as for refreshment: an egg shaken into syrup and charged water was pitched to clerks and shop girls as a light meal in a glass, and egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg creams all descend from the same counter practice. Acid phosphate, which gives this drink its name-adjacent bite, was one of the fountain's workhorse souring agents, and it appears in hundreds of formulas in the dispenser's manuals of the 1890s and 1900s. Collections like this one, framed as riding on Uncle Sam's water wagon, gathered fountain formulas expressly as substitutes for the saloon during the long run-up to national Prohibition, and the temperance sell explains the moralising drink names throughout the section. There is an irony in the fact that the ginger extract in the glass was itself an alcoholic tincture.