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Worcester Shake
Mix one tablespoonful of pineapple syrup, one tablespoonful of orange syrup, and one tablespoonful of sweet cream with one egg and a little shaved ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into a small glass. Add a little carbonated water.
This is a soda-fountain egg shake, and the egg goes into the glass raw and stays raw. That single fact governs everything else about the drink.
- The raw egg is the problemNothing in this drink is heated at any stage. A whole shell egg beaten into cold syrup, cream and ice is a straightforward Salmonella risk, and shaved ice keeps the mixture in the temperature range where any contamination survives intact.
- Cream and ice togetherSweet cream shaken with ice and served in an open glass was meant to be mixed and drunk straight away. It does not survive standing, and it is not something to batch.
- Fountain syrups, not juice"Pineapple syrup" and "orange syrup" mean the heavy sweetened fountain syrups a druggist kept in pumps, far sweeter and thicker than juice. Modern bottled juice is not a substitute in flavour or in sweetness, which is why the recipe gets away with only three tablespoonfuls of liquid.
- "A small glass"The recipe calls for only "a little" carbonated water at the end, not enough to fill a tall glass. The whole thing is a single serving, and a modest one.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved ice was the fountain standard because it chills and dilutes fast in a hand-shaken tin. Cubes in a modern shaker behave differently, aerating more and diluting less.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written with food safety in mind rather than adapting this one.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon comes out of the years around national and local prohibition campaigns, when the drugstore counter was pitched as the respectable alternative to the saloon and the "water wagon" of the title was the pledge of abstinence. Egg drinks were a mainstay of that trade: the egg gave a shake body, foam and a reputation for nourishment, and fountain men sold egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg creams. A "shake" in this period simply meant a drink built in the shaking tin rather than stirred in the glass, and named shakes were often tagged to a city, a hotel or a fountain proprietor, which is the likeliest source of the Worcester label here. The fruit syrups came from the same pumps that flavoured plain sodas, so a fountain could work from a handful of stock bottles, an egg crate and a block of ice.