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The Richmond (Put one egg into a shaker)
Put one egg into a shaker and add two tablespoonfuls of orange syrup, four tablespoonfuls of rich milk, and a ladleful of vanilla ice cream. Shake well, pour into a tall glass, and add soda water and whipped cream.
A soda-fountain egg drink of the 1910s, built in a shaker and finished at the tap. The problem is the whole egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionThe egg goes into the shaker raw and stays raw: nothing in the drink reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the ice cream and cold milk keep the mixture cold rather than killing anything present. Shell eggs of the period came from a very different supply chain than today's. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe written for pasteurized product.
- Dairy held cold and sweetMilk plus melted ice cream plus egg, stood in a tall glass with whipped cream on top, is a rich uncooked dairy mixture. It was meant to be drunk within a minute of being made at a counter, not carried around or held.
- A ladlefulFountain ice-cream ladles of the period ran roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces, so a single scoop's worth. The original gives no more precision than that.
- Orange syrupThis is fountain syrup — sugar, water and orange essence or juice, not a liqueur and not modern orange concentrate. Bottled coffee-shop syrups are the nearest current equivalent in sweetness.
- Rich milk"Rich" milk meant milk with the cream not skimmed off, so richer than today's standardized whole milk; whole milk with a little cream added is a reasonable stand-in.
- Soda waterCharged water from a fountain siphon, drawn hard into the glass to raise a head. Bottled seltzer is the same thing; club soda and tonic are not, one being mineralized and the other sweetened.
- YieldOne tall glass, about 10 to 12 ounces once the soda is drawn.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soda-fountain manuals published in the years when temperance sentiment was turning into national policy — the title itself is period slang for going dry. Drugstore fountains inherited the vocabulary and much of the theatre of the bar, which is why their drinks carry proper names like "The Richmond" and were built with shakers, ladles and a syphon. Whole raw egg was common fountain stock in this era, shaken into milk drinks for body and for the belief that it was nourishing; egg phosphates and egg malteds stayed on fountain menus for decades. The section heading "Orange and Pineapple" shows how these books were organized: not by kind of drink but by flavoring syrup, since a fountain's repertoire was defined by the bottles on its rail.