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Carnation Flip
Chipped ice, pineapple, strawberry and raspberry syrups, ice cream, plain cream, and an egg. A little nutmeg sprinkled on top. No soda water dealer can prepare all his fruit, concentrated syrups, or crushed fruits and make them as good or as cheaply as he can procure them from reputable manufacturers.
This is a trade formula from a soda dispenser's manual rather than a home recipe, and it is written for a fountain man who is assumed to know the drill. It cannot be made safely today because of one ingredient.
- The raw egg is the problemA flip is built cold, shaken or stirred with ice and served at once; the egg is never heated at any stage. Whole shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, and nothing in this drink brings the mixture anywhere near the 160F that would kill it. A current recipe using pasteurized eggs should be consulted instead.
- Who was drinking itFountain egg drinks were commonly promoted as nourishing or strengthening, and would likely have been offered to people who were run down. Whoever the drinkers were, an untreated raw egg carries the greatest risk for the young, the elderly and the unwell, which is worth knowing before treating the formula as a period curiosity to revive.
- "Flip" here is not the tavern drinkIn an American soda book of this era a flip means an egg drink built at the fountain, not the hot spiced ale-and-rum flip of the eighteenth-century tavern. No alcohol is involved.
- Plain creamPlain cream here means ordinary unwhipped, unsweetened dairy cream, as distinct from whipped cream, which the formula would have named separately. Depending on the place and date, such cream may not have been pasteurized.
- Chipped iceChipped or shaved ice came off a block with a pick or shaver. The fine pieces chilled the drink quickly rather than giving the crushed-ice texture of a modern blender drink.
- The three syrupsPineapple, strawberry and raspberry were common fruit syrups of the fountain trade, and the closing sentence shows they were expected to be bought ready-made rather than made on the premises. No quantities are given because the dispenser was assumed to know the proportions.
- The last sentence is advertisingThe closing remark about reputable manufacturers is trade copy rather than cooking instruction: it urges the operator to buy in rather than make his own.
The soda fountain flip belongs to a family of American egg drinks that also included the egg phosphate, the egg lemonade and the egg malted milk, drinks in which the egg was offered as nourishment as much as flavor. Fountains were fixtures of the drugstore, and a drink with an egg and cream in it could plausibly be recommended to someone who was run down; dusting nutmeg over egg-and-cream drinks is an older habit shared with posset, syllabub and tavern flip, though the connection here is a resemblance rather than a documented borrowing. The formula reads as a list of components rather than a procedure, and it breaks off into a paragraph urging the operator to buy his crushed fruits ready-made, which suggests it was written for the trade rather than the household. The safety assumptions behind it belong to a period before shell eggs were widely understood as a source of salmonellosis.