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Broadway Flip
Put in mixing glass two large sprays of mint, 1½ ounces blood orange syrup, 2 dashes of acid phosphate, 1 egg, fill glass half full shaved ice, shake well and strain. Add fine stream soda, toss several times, grate nutmeg on top and serve with straws.
A fountain flip of the acid-phosphate era: aromatic, foamy, and built on a whole raw egg that never sees heat. The terminology is worth decoding even though the drink itself is not one to build at home.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole egg is shaken cold with ice, strained, and served immediately — nothing in the procedure brings it anywhere near the 160F that inactivates Salmonella, and the acid phosphate and syrup do nothing to sanitise it. Soda fountains served these by the thousand from eggs of unknown age and handling. If you want a drink of this style, use a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to druggists as a tart, non-fruity souring agent. It gives sharpness without the flavour of citrus. It disappeared from general sale for decades and is again made in small batches for cocktail and soda work.
- Blood orange syrupA fountain syrup, not a juice: a heavy sugar syrup flavoured and coloured to the fruit. Fountain syrups of the period were generally much sweeter than a modern juice-based syrup, so half an ounce would have carried correspondingly more sugar.
- "½ ounces"The plural is a typo. Most likely half a fluid ounce, i.e. a tablespoon, though a dropped figure ('1½ ounces') cannot be ruled out.
- Shaved ice, not cubesFountains kept a block and a shave. The fine ice chills and aerates fast during a short shake and is meant to be strained out completely, which is why the drink is finished with soda rather than served over ice.
- "Fine stream" and "toss"The fine stream is the narrow, high-pressure draw from the soda arm, used to build foam; the coarse stream fills. Tossing is pouring the drink between two glasses to combine without breaking the head.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe does not state a glass size.
History: The flip began as a hot tavern drink -- beer, spirit and sugar, roused with a red-hot iron -- and the egg appears to have been a later addition; by the nineteenth century the name had detached from the iron and come to mean a drink containing a whole egg. American soda fountains took the form up during the temperance decades, when the druggist's counter set itself up as the respectable rival to the bar and reproduced its repertoire in syrup and carbonated water. Acid phosphate, the sour note in this glass, is a good marker of that pharmacy origin: it came from the same shelf as the tonics and nerve preparations, and phosphates were promoted with a vague suggestion of being good for the constitution. A Broadway name on a fountain drink most likely tied the glass to a fashionable street rather than to a particular bar or proprietor, though no origin for this one is documented either way.