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The Tacoma
Mix one tablespoonful each of pineapple, lemon, and orange syrups with one egg and four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Shake thoroughly, strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice, and add a spoonful of pineapple water ice or vanilla ice cream.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when the counterman built these to order. The mechanics are straightforward; the problem is the egg.
- Why the cautionThe whole egg goes into the glass raw and is never heated at any point — chilling it over cracked ice does nothing to it. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella that period cooks did not know about, and this drink is served immediately to one person with no acid, alcohol or heat step. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe written around pasteurized egg product.
- The syrupsThese are fountain syrups: heavy sugar-and-water solutions flavoured with fruit, not the thin bottled juices sold now. A tablespoon of each was meant to carry enough sugar to sweeten the whole glass, so modern juice substituted one-for-one would read as flat and sour.
- "Sweet cream"Cream that has not soured — the distinction mattered at a time when milk and cream turned quickly and sour cream was a normal kitchen ingredient rather than a product. Any modern light or heavy cream is what is meant.
- Pineapple water iceA fruit-and-sugar ice with no dairy, closer to a sorbet than a sherbet. The recipe offers vanilla ice cream as the alternative, which tells you the scoop is there for body and cold as much as for flavour.
- Shaking and strainingIn the original, the egg, syrups and cream are shaken together and then strained over ice already sitting in the glass, rather than shaken with the ice.
- YieldOne glass, roughly six to eight ounces once the ice and the scoop are in — a single serving meant to be drunk at the counter.
This comes from a book of soft drinks published for a nation that was arguing about alcohol, and the recipes are the temperance answer to a bar list. Fountain drinks like this one were sold against the backdrop of that argument — American drugstore counters had spent decades building an elaborate repertoire of syrups, creams, ices and shaken egg drinks, and by the 1910s a soda clerk was generally expected to work from a written recipe list much as a bartender did. Named drinks in these books were often christened after cities, hotels and railway lines, and The Tacoma appears to follow that habit; the attribution is likely decorative rather than documentary. The egg is the giveaway of period taste: shaken into cream and syrup, it was regarded as nourishing, a way of selling a drink as something closer to a meal.