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The Wilmington
Mix two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup, two tablespoonfuls of vanilla syrup, and one egg. Shake well and strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice. Add four tablespoonfuls of ice cream.
This is a soda-fountain formula, written for a counter stocked with commercial syrups and a shaker. The obstacle is the whole raw egg, which is shaken cold and served cold.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe egg goes into the shaker uncooked and the drink is served over cracked ice, so nothing in the sequence approaches the temperature at which Salmonella is killed. The shell-egg supply chain of the period was a very different one; that is not an argument that the drink is safe to make this way now.
- Cold dilution does not helpThere is no alcohol and no heat here to do any work on the egg, and whatever acidity the pineapple syrup carries is not a treatment for a raw egg. The syrups are essentially sugar solutions, and the ice cream only drops the temperature further, which slows bacterial growth rather than removing the hazard.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built for pasteurised egg product or omit the egg entirely. We are not going to rewrite the proportions here.
- What the syrups wereFountain syrups were heavy sugar syrups, often on the order of two parts sugar to one of water, flavoured with fruit juice or extract, rather than the thin flavouring preparations the name suggests today.
- ScaleFour tablespoons of ice cream is a quarter cup, about one small scoop. The finished drink is a single small glass, not a milkshake.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of non-alcoholic drink books published around the arrival of national Prohibition, when bartenders and soda men both needed a repertoire that would stand in for the cocktail list. Egg drinks were central to that substitution: the flip and the egg nogg had long been respectable saloon items, and shaking a whole egg into syrup and ice cream gave a temperance drink the body and the foam that made it feel like something more than sweetened water. Drinks in these collections were routinely named for cities, hotels and railway lines, which is the likeliest explanation for "The Wilmington" he of the fountain trade rather than a claim of local origin.