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Boston Flip
One-half ounce lemon syrup, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, 1 egg; ¼ glass cracked ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve with nutmeg or cinnamon.
This is a soda-fountain flip: a whole raw egg shaken with fruit syrups and ice, strained, and dusted with spice. The technique is straightforward, but the egg is never heated at any point, which is why the drink cannot be recommended as written.
- The raw egg is the problemThe whole egg goes into the shaker and straight into the glass. Nothing in the recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and shell eggs are the classic vehicle for it. A current recipe using a treated egg product should be consulted instead.
- Nothing here mitigates the riskAlcoholic flips at least carry spirit; this one has none, being built on lemon and pineapple syrup and ice. Sugar, weak fruit acid and cold do not make a raw egg safe.
- Both white and yolkThe recipe uses the entire egg, so both parts are unheated. The white is what contributes most of the foam.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg is a particular hazard for young children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- Reading the measuresFountain syrups were dispensed by the ounce. The recipe does not state the glass size, so "¼ glass cracked ice" cannot be converted exactly; a quarter of an 8-ounce soda glass would be roughly 2 ounces of ice, about a quarter of a cup. Lemon and pineapple syrup here are sweetened flavouring syrups, not juice.
- "Toss"Probably means pouring the strained drink between two vessels to raise the foam before serving, though the book does not explain it. Either way it does nothing to the egg.
The flip began as a hot tavern drink “— ale or cider with spirit, sugar and often a beaten egg, heated by plunging in a loggerhead iron straight from the fire — and the name is generally traced to that frothing or "flipping" up of the mixture. By the time soda fountains dominated American counters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the form had been stripped of both heat and alcohol: the egg stayed, because it was what gave the drink its body and crown of foam, and the syrups replaced the liquor. City names were attached freely to such formulas, though what a "Boston" flip was meant to signal is not clear from the page itself. The generous use of raw egg across the whole genre is a reminder that egg drinks were sold as nourishment for invalids — at a period when the bacteriology of the shell egg was not part of the counterman's training.