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The Woodstock (Beat one egg until light)
Beat one egg until light and mix with two tablespoonfuls of chocolate syrup, two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, and one tablespoonful of malted milk. Add a spoonful of ice cream and shake well. Pour into a glass, add more milk and a little nutmeg.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink, and the egg is the problem: it is beaten raw into cold liquid and never heated at any point. The remaining notes explain the drink and its terms, not a way around that.
- The raw egg is the hingeNothing in this recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella — the egg is beaten, shaken with cold cream and ice cream, and served immediately. Shell-egg handling in 1919 was less closely regulated than it is now, and the drink was consumed within a minute of mixing.
- Cold shaking does nothingThere is a persistent belief that acid or vigorous agitation makes a raw egg safe. Neither does. Chocolate syrup and cream are close to neutral, and shaking only disperses the egg through the glass. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or liquid egg product.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh unsoured cream, as against the cultured or "sour" cream also sold then. Light cream is the modern equivalent; the raw or merely ladle-skimmed cream a 1919 fountain might use is a second unheated-dairy concern on top of the egg.
- Malted milkMalted barley and wheat extract dried with whole milk, sold in tins as Horlick's and its imitators. Plain malted milk powder is still made and is what the tablespoonful means — not the flavored drink mixes, and not malt syrup.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the era was generally cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a thin pouring consistency, thinner than a modern squeeze-bottle syrup.
- What "shake well" assumedA fountain shake was worked in a tinned-steel cup, by hand or on a spindle drink mixer, which brought the egg to a foam quickly. A covered cocktail shaker or a jar gets close, though the texture will be denser.
- YieldOne glass, roughly 8 to 10 ounces once the milk is topped up.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of temperance drink books published as national Prohibition came into view, when the soda fountain was expected to absorb the saloon's trade "on the water wagon" was already common slang for having sworn off liquor. Drinks like this one were sold as nourishment as much as refreshment: egg, cream, ice cream and malted milk together made a glass that could stand in for a meal, and druggists dispensed them on that footing, which is why malted milk was a pharmacy product before it was a flavor. Named fountain concoctions of the period seem often to have been christened after towns, colleges, hotels or the clerk who invented them, and Woodstock is most likely one of the several American places of that name rather than anything to do with the later festival. The nutmeg grating at the end is usually taken to be inherited from the egg nogs and milk punches this drink was built to replace.