Home › Strawberry and Raspberry › Windsor Shake
Windsor Shake
Put into a shaker four tablespoonfuls of strawberry syrup and add two eggs, a dash of ginger syrup, four tablespoonfuls of sweet cream, and a little cracked ice. Shake well, add soda water, and pour from shaker to glass several times to thoroughly blend.
This is a soda fountain formula from the era when the drug store counter competed directly with the saloon, and it is built on two whole raw eggs that are never heated at any point.
- Why this one failsTwo eggs go into the shaker raw and are served raw, chilled by cracked ice and diluted with cold soda water. Nothing in the procedure approaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the drink is not held cold for long either, being shaken, poured back and forth, and handed over at once.
- Shell eggs then and nowThe period recipe assumes ordinary shell eggs. Modern shell eggs carry a low but real rate of internal contamination, which is why current practice for uncooked egg drinks is a pasteurized product. If you want a strawberry egg shake, use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs rather than this text.
- Cream is a second issue"Sweet cream" meant fresh, unsoured cream, not necessarily pasteurized cream. Combined with raw egg at room temperature, the mixture is a good growth medium.
- What the syrups wereStrawberry and ginger syrups of this period were heavy sugar syrups, thicker and sweeter than a modern squeeze-bottle dessert sauce. Four tablespoonfuls of one is a quarter cup, so the drink was very sweet by current taste.
- "Soda water"This means charged water from a fountain tap. The recipe has you pour from shaker to glass several times, which it says is to blend the mixture thoroughly.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon is generally grouped with the American soda fountain literature of the era before national Prohibition, when temperance sentiment and the licensed drug store combined to make the fountain a serious commercial rival to the bar. Drinks of this family, egg, cream, fruit syrup and charged water, were sold as much for nourishment as refreshment: the whole egg was widely regarded in the period as a tonic, and "egg phosphates," "egg lemonades" and egg shakes appear throughout fountain literature of the 1900s and 1910s. The ginger syrup cuts the flatness of sweetened cream and gives the drink a little warmth on the finish. Fountain dispensing began to specialize away from raw egg in the following decades, partly on grounds of speed and partly, as milk and egg sanitation regulation tightened through the 1920s and 1930s, on grounds of safety.