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American Beauty
One-half ounce rose syrup, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, 4 dashes port wine, 1 egg, 2 ounces plain cream, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain shake from the era when every drugstore counter cracked whole raw eggs to order. The measures are dispenser measures, and the egg is the problem.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker and is served straight out of the strainer, so nothing in the drink ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Fountain practice assumed a fresh local egg and a strong stomach; neither is a control. If you want a drink of this style, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg.
- The cream compounds it"Plain cream" is simply sweet, unwhipped cream; at the date of this recipe it may well have been unpasteurized, since compulsory pasteurization was not yet general. Raw cream carries its own risk of Listeria and Campylobacter, and shaking it with raw egg and holding the glass at room temperature gives both organisms a comfortable medium. Use pasteurized cream.
- Fountain syrups are not table syrupsRose and pineapple syrup here are the heavy sweetened dispensing syrups a soda fountain ran on, not flavourings. Bottled cocktail syrups are close; rose water or rose extract is not, being unsweetened and far more perfumed.
- Dashes and glassesA dash is conventionally reckoned at about an eighth of a teaspoon, so four dashes of port is roughly half a teaspoon, a colouring and aroma rather than a drink. "¼ glass ice" means the mixing glass filled a quarter with shaved ice; the recipe does not say what size that glass was, so judge it by eye and expect dilution as it is shaken.
- Toss, not pour"Toss" here most likely means throwing the mixture between two vessels held apart to aerate it, a foam technique rather than a garbled instruction, though the term is not defined in the text.
Egg drinks were a mainstay of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through Prohibition, sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure -- the egg-and-cream shake sat in the same commercial space as the tonic and the malted milk. The name plausibly follows the fountain habit of borrowing from florists and society pages: American Beauty was a celebrated crimson hybrid perpetual rose, hugely fashionable as a cut flower in the 1890s, and the rose syrup tinted with port suits it. Other drinks of the period carry the same name. The trace of port is characteristic of pre-Prohibition fountain work, where a few dashes of wine or a bitter were treated as flavouring agents rather than alcohol, dispensed at a counter that also sold medicine.