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The Savannah
Mix one tablespoonful each of pineapple, orange, and vanilla syrups. Add one egg and a spoonful of ice cream. Shake well, pour into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice, and add carbonated water.
This is a soda fountain formula: a shaken egg drink built in the glass with carbonated water from a tap. The reason it cannot be reproduced as written is the whole egg, which is never cooked at any stage.
- The raw egg is the problemThe egg is broken into the shaker, shaken with cold syrup and ice cream, and served immediately over ice. Nothing in the sequence reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe written around pasteurized product.
- Chilled, not just uncookedCold does not help. The drink is held at fountain temperature and served, and the ice and carbonated water dilute rather than treat it.
- "Ice cream" meant something denserFountain ice cream of this period was generally hard-frozen and denser than modern commercial ice cream, scooped stiff, so a spoonful would have been more solid than a modern soft scoop.
- The syrupsPineapple, orange, and vanilla syrups here are heavy fountain syrups, sweeter and thicker than a modern flavouring or coffee syrup. The recipe does not say how much soda water to add.
- Carbonated waterThe original assumed a pressurized fountain tap rather than a bottle. Bottled seltzer delivers a gentler stream.
- YieldOne glass, a single serving.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance publishing of the era around Prohibition, when soda fountains were promoted as the respectable alternative to the saloon and drugstore counters often carried a repertoire of drinks with names borrowed from cocktails, cities, and ships. Titles like "The Savannah" plausibly belong to that borrowing — the glamour of a mixed-drink list without the alcohol — though the connection is inference rather than documented. The egg is the period detail that dates it most sharply: egg phosphates and egg lemonades were standard fountain fare, sold partly as refreshment and partly as nourishment, since the drugstore fountain grew out of the pharmacy and still traded on the idea that a drink could be tonic. Whole raw egg in a shaken beverage was unremarkable in American drink writing well into the twentieth century, and it disappeared from mainstream recipes only as understanding of egg-borne Salmonella and modern food-safety guidance took hold.