Home › Chocolate › The Thorndike
The Thorndike
Mix one teaspoonful of malted milk with two tablespoonfuls of cream, and add one egg, three tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, and four tablespoonfuls of grape juice. Shake well and serve with soda water.
A soda-fountain formula from the temperance era, built at the counter and finished from the syrup taps. The reason it cannot be reproduced as written is the whole egg, which is added raw to a cold drink and never heated at any point.
- The raw eggA whole shell egg is broken into the shaker and served immediately, with no heat step and no acid or alcohol strong enough to matter. That is a direct Salmonella route, and the risk is not theoretical for a drink handed to a child or an elderly drinker. A current recipe using pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg should be followed instead.
- Malted milkStill sold, and still the same thing: dried milk and malted barley and wheat flour, ground to a powder. A single teaspoonful here is a flavour accent rather than a thickener.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup was often made in-house from cocoa, sugar and water; its consistency and sweetness will not necessarily match a modern squeeze-bottle sundae syrup, so a bottled product may read differently from the original.
- Grape juiceFour tablespoonfuls is a substantial pour, and at this period it would most likely have meant unfermented Concord juice, a staple temperance beverage. Its sharp foxy flavour carries the drink.
- Soda water"Serve with soda water" means the shaken mixture goes into the glass and carbonated water is drawn in on top. It is one drink, not a batch.
- ShakingA fountain shaker was a metal cup worked by hand or on a spindle mixer, and the egg would have contributed foam as well as body. Nothing about the technique reduces the microbiological problem.
"On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon" belongs to a small genre of trade books published as American temperance sentiment hardened toward national Prohibition: collections of fountain drinks meant to give the soda counter a repertoire as varied and as grown-up-sounding as the bar it was replacing. Named drinks like this one were often called after hotels, clubs or regular customers, and the source of a particular name is usually not recorded. Egg drinks appear regularly in fountain collections of the period, where malted milk and a whole raw egg made a beverage that could be presented as nourishment as well as refreshment; malted milk powder had been commercialised in the later nineteenth century and was marketed for invalids and infants, which helps explain the air of wholesomeness it carried into drinks like this. Grape juice completes the picture, an unfermented juice promoted by temperance advocates as the respectable alternative to wine.