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The Richmond (Mix one tablespoonful each)
Mix one tablespoonful each of raspberry, orange, and pineapple syrups with one egg and one half a teaspoonful of lime juice. Shake well, strain into a glass one half full of cracked ice. Fill up with soda water.
A soda fountain egg drink of the sort a dispenser would build to order behind the counter. The obstacle is the egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Raw shell egg, unheatedThe whole egg is shaken with cold syrup and ice and served immediately. Nothing in the procedure reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg rather than only on its surface. A little lime juice does not acidify the drink anywhere near enough to matter.
- Why this was less of a gamble in 1900Salmonella Enteritidis in table eggs became a widespread problem only later in the twentieth century, with the consolidation of laying flocks. Fountain eggs were presumably bought in small lots and cracked to order, though handling at any particular fountain is not documented. If you want an egg drink, use a current recipe written around pasteurized egg.
- The syrupsRaspberry, orange and pineapple here mean thick fountain syrups — sugar-heavy flavoring bases, roughly 2:1 sugar to water, not the thin cordials or the sugar-free flavor shots sold now. A tablespoonful of the old syrup carried far more sweetness and body than the same volume of a modern equivalent.
- Soda waterFountain soda was drawn under pressure from a carbonator, and it is the charge hitting the egg that gives these drinks their foam; the shaking-and-straining structure is built around that.
- Cracked iceIce chipped from a block into irregular pieces, coarser than the crushed ice used for juleps and slower-melting than small cubes.
- YieldOne drink; the recipe does not specify a glass size.
- The odd titleThe heading "Mix one tablespoonful each" looks like an artifact of the entry running the opening words of the formula on from the drink's name, with the phrase pulled up into the title here.
Books like this one belong to the American soda fountain trade, which boomed alongside the temperance movement. Druggists and confectioners needed a repertoire of showy mixed drinks that contained no spirits, and they borrowed wholesale from the bartender's grammar: shake, strain, build over ice, top up. Egg drinks were a large and respectable part of that repertoire, sold as nourishment as much as refreshment, and survive in name in the egg cream and the egg phosphate. Named formulas of this kind — after cities, hotels, or regular customers — often appear to have been house inventions circulated between fountains and reprinted freely, so an attribution like "The Richmond" may record nothing more than where a dispenser happened to work or which town he wanted to flatter.