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The San Remo
Whip the white of one egg with two tablespoonfuls of plain syrup, flavored with a few drops of vanilla extract. Add one half glassful of shaved ice and shake thoroughly. Pour into a tall glass and fill up with cold milk. A grating of nutmeg may be added.
A soda-fountain egg drink of the temperance era, built in the shaker and finished at the glass. The period vocabulary is easy enough to decode; the raw egg white is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe egg white is never heated at any stage — it is whipped, shaken with ice and served. Raw or lightly handled egg white can carry Salmonella, which the drink gives no opportunity to kill. Fountain operators of the period had no way to know this and no pasteurised product to fall back on.
- If you want an egg drink todayUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or a commercial liquid white, and follow its handling instructions rather than these.
- Plain syrupSimple syrup: sugar dissolved in water, the standard sweetener at the soda fountain because granulated sugar dissolves poorly in a cold drink.
- GlassfulAn unfixed measure. Fountain glasses of the period ran roughly 8 to 12 ounces, so "one half glassful of shaved ice" means something like half a cup to three-quarters of a cup — the original is genuinely imprecise here.
- Shaved iceNot cubes. Fountains shaved or chipped ice from a block so it would chill instantly and partly melt into the drink, thinning it as it diluted. Crushed ice is the nearest modern equivalent.
- YieldOne tall glass, roughly 10 to 12 ounces once the milk is added.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of temperance drink books published in the years just before national Prohibition, when the soda fountain was positioned as a respectable rival to the saloon and dispensed a full menu of shaken, whipped and syruped drinks with its own bar-style patter. Egg drinks were a large part of that menu: the white gave a cold beverage the foam and body that a cocktail got from spirits and shaking, and the milk-and-egg combination carried a reputation as nourishing rather than merely refreshing, which suited the moral argument the books were making. Fountain drinks were routinely named after fashionable places and resorts, and the San Remo almost certainly nods to the Ligurian resort town on the Italian Riviera, though the naming is a matter of convention rather than anything documented. The grating of nutmeg at the end is the older tradition showing through — nutmeg had finished egg-and-milk drinks, from possets to eggnog, for centuries before the fountain took them over.