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Catawba Flip
Ice Cream, 1 ounce; Egg, 1.
Chipped Ice Catawba Grape Syrup, 1 ounce.
A sufficient quantity Put all into a shaker, and mix thoroughly. Strain into a 12-ounce glass, and fill with soda water, drawing small stream. Dust some nutmeg over the top of the glass. Sells like hot cakes.
This is a fountain flip: a whole raw egg shaken with ice cream, syrup and ice, then lengthened with carbonated water. The egg is never heated at any stage, which is the reason the drink cannot be made as printed.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg goes into the shaker and nothing in the procedure raises its temperature above the ice in the glass. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis inside an intact, clean shell, and shaking with ice does nothing to it. A current recipe using pasteurized egg product should be consulted instead.
- Cold and acid are not safeguardsNeither ice, carbonation nor fruit acid makes a raw-egg flip safe. Grape syrup is only mildly acidic and is heavily diluted by the soda water, and chilling slows bacterial growth without killing anything already present.
- Ice cream compounds itThe ice cream called for here may itself have an egg-custard base, and the recipe gives no indication of how it was made or held. Adding it to a raw egg drink can stack one uncooked dairy risk on another.
- "Sells like hot cakes"The line is the compiler's aside to the reader rather than part of the method, and it indicates the book was addressed to the man behind the counter rather than the home cook.
- What the units meanAn ounce here is a fluid ounce dipped or pumped, about two tablespoons; how the one ounce of ice cream was measured is not stated. "Drawing small stream" means the fine tap on the soda draught arm, used to avoid blowing the foam out of the glass.
- Catawba grape syrupCatawba is an American labrusca-derived grape with a distinctly foxy, musky flavour, the same character found in Concord grape juice. Catawba fountain syrup is no longer a commercial article; bottled Catawba juice is occasionally found, and Concord is the easiest substitute.
The flip is older than the soda fountain: in English and colonial taverns it meant beer or rum, sugar and often egg, roused to a froth with a red-hot iron loggerhead. When American temperance sentiment and the drugstore counter took over the business of mixed drinks in the later nineteenth century, dispensers kept the vocabulary and swapped the liquor for syrup and carbonated water, so fountain guides of the period print flips, cobblers, punches and shrubs alongside sundaes. Catawba, usually said to be named for the Catawba River in the Carolinas, and propagated commercially from the 1820s, was the grape that made Ohio Valley winemaking briefly famous around Cincinnati; long after that industry collapsed the name survived on bottled juices and fountain syrups, which is how it turns up here as a flavour a soda clerk was expected to have on hand.