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Charlotte Russe (Shaved Ice tumblerful Vanilla)
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Vanilla Syrup, 1 ounce; Cream, 6 ounces; Egg, 1. Shake well and fill with soda water, using fine stream. Serve in 14-OZ. tumbler and with spoon. It will have a head like a charlotte
This is a fountain drink built on a whole raw egg beaten into cream and finished with carbonated water. Nothing in it is ever heated, which is where it runs into trouble now.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg goes into the shaker and reaches the glass uncooked and undiluted by anything acidic or alcoholic. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis inside an intact, clean shell, a route of contamination not understood when this book was written.
- Cold, sweet dairy is a growth mediumCold, sweet dairy carries the risk forward -- six ounces of cream plus syrup plus a raw egg, shaken and then drunk slowly with a spoon, warms as it stands. More to the point, there is no step anywhere in the recipe that kills anything.
- Fountain-era assumptions no longer holdSoda counters worked in a period when both the understood risk and the standard of care were different. If you want an egg cream or a Charlotte Russe soda, use a current recipe written around pasteurized ingredients.
- Reading the measuresThe 14 ounces named at the end is the serving glass; the tumbler used to measure the shaved ice is not specified and, given that the drink also takes 1 ounce of syrup, 6 ounces of cream and soda water, it must be smaller. Vanilla syrup at the fountain was a heavy sugar syrup, far thicker and sweeter than the thin extract-flavoured syrup sold now.
- "Fine stream"Fountain taps offered a coarse stream and a fine one. The fine stream was used on anything containing cream or egg, because a hard jet of carbonated water collapses the foam instead of building it. That is what produces the tall head the recipe compares to a charlotte.
Soda fountains borrowed freely from the pastry cook's vocabulary, and this drink is named for the charlotte russe, the molded dessert of ladyfingers filled with Bavarian cream that Careme is generally credited with naming for a Russian patron. The connection is entirely visual and textural: egg and cream shaken with fine-stream carbonation throw up a thick, pale, spooning-thick head, and a fountain man could sell that as a dessert in a glass. Egg drinks were a fixture of the American fountain from the 1880s through Prohibition, when the soda counter took over much of the saloon's trade in nourishing, showy, no-alcohol refreshment; egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg chocolates all sat on the same list. In time they faded from fountain menus.