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Touraine Shake
Mix four tablespoonfuls of raspberry syrup, one tablespoonful of pineapple syrup, six tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, and one egg. Shake, strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice and fill up with cold milk.
A soda-fountain shake of the pre-Prohibition era, built on syrups, cream and a whole raw egg. The egg is the problem: nothing in the drink is ever heated, and the mixture is served cold.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker and straight into the glass. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk and white, and shaking with ice neither kills it nor slows it meaningfully. A current recipe using pasteurized egg should be used instead.
- What the syrups wereFountain syrups of the period were heavy sugar syrups — roughly two parts sugar to one of water — flavoured with fruit juice or extract, not the thin bottled cordials sold now. Four tablespoons of raspberry syrup was doing most of the sweetening work in the glass.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream and clabbered milk also common in period recipes. It is not a sweetened product; the sugar comes entirely from the syrups.
- Shake, then strainThe strain is not decorative. The egg is shaken whole with the syrups to emulsify it, and straining catches chalazae and any shell fragment as the mixture goes over the cracked ice, before the milk fills the glass — the same technique bartenders used for flips and fizzes.
- YieldOne tall soda-fountain glass; the finished volume depends on the glass, since the milk simply fills it up.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the great age of the American soda fountain, when druggists and hotel counters sold elaborate non-alcoholic mixed drinks to a public increasingly under temperance pressure — the "water wagon" of the title being the pledge to abstain. Egg shakes like this one were sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure; a whole egg beaten into milk and cream was widely regarded as a restorative, and fountain manuals of the 1900s and 1910s are full of egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg creams. The name is generally traced to the Hotel Touraine in Boston, opened in 1897 and fashionable enough that fountain men attached its name to drinks, though as with most fountain formulas the attribution is trade lore rather than documented fact. What the recipe really records is a moment when the soda counter was borrowing the bartender's whole toolkit — the shaker, the strainer, the cracked ice, the raw egg — and putting it to work without the liquor.