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Alaska Snow Ball
One-half ounce pineapple syrup, ½ ounce lemon syrup, ½ ounce orange syrup, 1 egg, 2 ounces plain cream, ¼ glass shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain shake from the era when a raw shell egg was standard equipment behind the counter. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the drink itself is not safe to reproduce as written.
- Why it fails todayThe egg is broken raw into the shaker and never heated at any point, and nothing in the procedure reduces the risk. Intact-shell eggs are a recognised vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis; the drink is cold from start to finish, so nothing kills the organism.
- The cream compounds it'Plain cream' at a fountain of this period may well have been unpasteurised, since pasteurisation of cream was not yet universal. Raw cream carries its own risks, and the drink is served cold, so nothing in the method controls either ingredient.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg product, and follow its handling instructions rather than these.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesFountain syrups were measured by volume from a pump or graduate, so ½ ounce is a tablespoon. Two ounces of cream is a quarter cup.
- "¼ glass shaved ice"The reference is to the fountain glass the formula assumes; glasses of the period ran roughly 8 to 12 ounces, so a quarter glass is something like 2 to 3 ounces, about a third of a cup. Shaved, not cubed: it partly dissolves in the shaker and gives the drink its body.
- "Toss"Fountain shorthand for pouring the strained mixture back and forth between two vessels from a height, which aerates it and raises a foam. It is not a synonym for shaking again.
- YieldOne glass. Fountain formulas are written per serving and do not scale gracefully, since the ice-to-syrup ratio is what sets the texture.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1900s and 1910s are full of egg drinks — egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg creams — because a raw egg was sold as nourishment as much as flavour, the fountain having inherited a good deal of the drugstore's medicinal manner. The naming is of its period too: American cooks and confectioners are often said to have reached for "Alaska" in naming pale or chilled confections in the decades after the 1867 purchase, the best-known survivor being baked Alaska. Formula books like this one were working references for the man behind the counter, written in ounces and glass-fractions he could execute without weighing anything.