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Caramel Egg Fizz, Hot
One ounce cream, ½ ounce American Chocolate Paste, ½ ounce vanilla syrup, 2 drams coffee, 1 egg. Mix thoroughly and stir while adding hot water. Serve grated nutmeg or cinnamon.
A hot fountain drink from the era when the soda clerk kept a bowl of shell eggs beside the syrup pumps. The archaic measures are easy enough to read, but the egg is the problem and it is not a problem that can be adjusted away.
- Why this one failsA whole raw egg is beaten into cream and syrup and then let down with hot water from the fountain urn. Nothing here reaches or holds a temperature that would kill Salmonella in the yolk: the water is diluted instantly by cold cream and thick paste, and the drink is served at once. It is a raw-egg beverage in a warm glass, not a cooked custard. Use a current recipe if you want a hot egg drink.
- The fountain assumptionThese formulas were written for a marble counter with a hot-water draw-off, at a period when raw egg in soda water, egg phosphates and egg lemonades were standard trade. That tolerance for risk is gone.
- DramsA fluid dram is one eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly three quarters of a teaspoon, so 2 drams of coffee is about a teaspoon and a half. At that small a quantity it was most likely a concentrated coffee extract or coffee syrup rather than brewed coffee.
- American Chocolate PasteA trade product of the period: a thick sweetened chocolate preparation meant to hold in a fountain jar and dissolve without lumping. There is no shelf equivalent now; the nearest thing is a thick chocolate sauce or ganache, which is sweeter and much fattier.
- Vanilla syrupFountain vanilla syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with vanilla, generally thicker than the thin flavoured syrups sold for coffee today. Half an ounce of it is a tablespoon.
- CreamOne ounce is two tablespoons. Fountain cream of the day was unhomogenised and probably nearer modern light cream than heavy whipping cream in fat content.
- YieldThe proportions build a single glass; the recipe does not say how much hot water, so final volume is a matter of judgement. "Serve grated nutmeg or cinnamon" means dust the top of the finished drink, as with an eggnog.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries devote whole chapters to egg drinks, and the hot ones were seasonal trade: when the weather turned and cold soda stopped selling, the fountain switched to hot beef tea, hot chocolate, hot malted milk and drinks like this, drawn with hot water from an urn built into the counter. Egg beverages sat on the line between refreshment and tonic, and appealed to customers who wanted something sustaining rather than merely sweet, which is why the mixture reads more like a meal than a soda. The nutmeg or cinnamon finish is often said to descend from the older tavern tradition of possets, flips and eggnogs, all of which were dusted with spice at the moment of serving. Formulas of this type largely disappeared from fountain work as public health rules on shell eggs tightened and as the fountain itself gave way to the packaged soft drink.