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The Stratford
Mix one tablespoonful each of strawberry, raspberry, and grape syrups, add one egg, and three tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Shake, strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice and fill up with soda water.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink: the whole egg is shaken raw with syrup and cream and never heated at any point. That single fact rules the recipe out as written, and the notes below explain why and what else in it has shifted since 1913.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg goes into the shaker and the finished drink is served cold over ice. Nothing in the procedure reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean, uncracked egg.
- Cream compounds it"Sweet cream" here means fresh cream rather than soured, and depending on where it was bought it may well have been unpasteurised. It is shaken cold with a raw egg rather than cooked, and raw egg plus raw dairy in a cold drink is exactly the situation modern food-safety guidance is written against.
- No safe substitute is offered herePasteurised-shell-egg and liquid-egg products exist and are what a soda fountain would use today, but the quantities, handling and holding in this text were never written with them in mind. If you want an egg soda, work from a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- What the syrups wereStrawberry, raspberry and grape syrups in a fountain book of this date were typically heavy sugar syrups flavoured with fruit juice, not the thin flavouring squeezes sold for coffee now. A tablespoonful is about half a fluid ounce, so the three together come to roughly an ounce and a half of syrup.
- "Soda water" means charged waterHere it is plain carbonated water drawn from a pressurised fountain, not a sweetened soft drink. "Fill up" means to the top of the serving glass, whose size the recipe does not specify.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice is broken by hand from a block into irregular pieces, and its greater surface area chills faster than cubes. How much a glass a quarter full holds depends on the glass, which the recipe does not specify.
- YieldOne drink. Fountain recipes of this era are generally written per glass, which is likely why no serving count is given.
Books like this one belong to the golden age of the American soda fountain, when the druggist's marble counter was both a pharmacy sideline and a respectable alternative to the saloon. Egg drinks were a fountain staple in that world, sold as nourishment as much as refreshment: the whole egg shaken with cream gave body and a foamy head. Whole-egg fountain drinks faded through the middle of the twentieth century as tastes changed and, later, as egg-handling rules tightened.