The Willard
Shake together one egg, a tablespoonful of rich cream, two tablespoonfuls of strawberry syrup, and a little cracked ice. Put a ladleful of vanilla ice cream in a suitable glass. Cover with chopped cherries and pour over the egg syrup.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen one, and it turns on a raw shell egg shaken cold and served immediately. That is the part that no longer works.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe egg is broken into a shaker with cream and syrup, chilled with ice, and poured over ice cream. Nothing in the sequence brings it near a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg. The fountain trade of the period accepted that risk; current practice does not, and a raw-egg drink should be made from a current recipe written around pasteurized egg.
- Who is most at riskChildren, older people, pregnant women, the immunocompromised and the convalescent are the groups for whom an egg-borne infection is most likely to become serious, and an unheated egg drink should not be served to them.
- "A ladleful"Roughly a standard scoop, on the order of 2 ounces. "A suitable glass" is left unspecified in the recipe: something large enough to hold the ice cream, cherries and the shaken egg mixture.
- Strawberry syrupThis is fountain syrup — a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with strawberry, closer to a snow-cone syrup than to fruit preserves or a modern coulis. Two tablespoonfuls of it is a lot of sugar by current taste.
- Cracked iceChipped from a block with an ice pick, so irregular and fast-melting; its job here is to chill and aerate during shaking. The recipe does not say whether it is strained out, though the instruction to pour the mixture over the ice cream implies it is.
- YieldOne glass, one serving.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance drink literature of the early twentieth century, when soda fountains were promoted as the respectable alternative to the saloon and drink books borrowed hotel names to lend a house recipe prestige. Egg drinks were central to that argument: an egg shaken into cream and syrup let a fountain claim it was selling nourishment rather than mere confectionery, an inheritance from the medicinal egg nogs and "egg phosphates" that druggist-dispensers had long been mixing, in an era when most American soda fountains still sat behind a pharmacy counter. Pouring the shaken egg mixture over vanilla ice cream, rather than serving it in a glass on its own, marks the point at which the sundae — generally traced to the 1880s and 1890s and often said to have arisen from local bans on Sunday soda-water sales — had become elaborate enough to absorb the older drinks whole.