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The Utica
Whip the white of one egg with two tablespoonfuls of cream, add a tablespoonful of raspberry syrup and a little shaved ice. Shake well, pour into a glass and fill up with Vichy.
A turn-of-the-century soda-fountain drink built on raw egg white, which is where it runs into trouble; the rest is straightforward fountain work.
- Why the cautionThe egg white is never heated at any stage. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and in the white, and shaking with ice does nothing to reduce it. A drink of this type should be made from a current recipe written with that risk in mind.
- Cream, unspecifiedThe recipe also relies on uncooked cream, and nothing in the method addresses it.
- VichyVichy was the standard fountain term for a mineral water high in sodium bicarbonate, drawn carbonated from the tap. Plain sparkling water is the nearest modern equivalent, though it lacks the faintly salty, alkaline edge that softened the acidity of the fruit syrup.
- Raspberry syrupFountain syrup, not preserve or coulis: a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with raspberry rather than a jam.
- Shaved iceShaved rather than cubed; the recipe does not say why, nor whether the drink was strained.
- YieldOne glass; the recipe does not say what size.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one multiplied during the temperance decades, when the drugstore counter was positioning itself as the respectable rival to the saloon. The drink belongs to the fountain family of egg creams, flips and frappes, in which a whipped egg white gave a non-alcoholic mixture body and a head. Drinks were often named for cities and hotels, and Utica, New York, was a substantial manufacturing city; whether the drink originated there or simply borrowed the name is not recorded. The recipe also shows how much these counters depended on deliveries of cream and eggs and on ice at hand.