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Chocolate Mexican
The way they serve it in Mexico. One egg, 1½ ounces chocolate syrup, 1 teaspoonful sweet cream, ½ teaspoonful cinnamon, ½ teaspoonful salt; shake well, strain into a cup and add 1 cupful of hot water. Top with a spoonful of whipped cream.
This is a fountain drink built on a raw egg that is never cooked. The points below explain where it fails and what the original measurements mean.
- The egg is the problemA whole raw egg is shaken with syrup and cream, strained, and then met with a single cupful of hot water. Water from an urn, diluted immediately by a cold shaken base in a room-temperature cup, does not hold the mixture anywhere near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella; the drink is served and swallowed within seconds. Use a current recipe for a hot chocolate if you want one.
- Straining does nothing for safetyThe strainer catches chalazae and shell fragments, not bacteria. Raw egg was added to fountain drinks of this period as a nutritive extra, at a time when the pathogen risk of shell eggs was not generally recognised.
- "½ ounces chocolate syrup" is ambiguousThe plural with a half suggests a typesetting error; comparable fountain drinks are often built on roughly 1 to 1½ fluid ounces (2 to 3 tablespoons) of chocolate syrup.
- The salt is out of proportionA half teaspoon of salt in one cup of liquid is roughly 1,150 mg of sodium and would read as brine. A few grains or a pinch is the usual order of magnitude for salt in a drink like this, and the fraction here looks copied from the cinnamon line above it.
- "Sweet cream"Simply unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream or clabbered milk also stocked in period kitchens. Nothing exotic is meant.
Soda fountain books of the early twentieth century were full of drinks advertised as foreign, and "the way they serve it in Mexico" was a selling line as much as a description. What it gestures at is real enough: Mexican drinking chocolate is traditionally scented with canela, the soft-barked Ceylon cinnamon, and whisked to a foam with a wooden molinillo. The egg is often said to be the American contribution, though egg-enriched chocolate drinks were not exclusively American. Egg drinks, egg phosphates and egg chocolates were fountain staples in this period, sold as strengthening food for clerks and invalids at a time when a raw egg beaten into a glass was considered a tonic rather than a hazard, and the fountain dispenser doubled as a kind of informal druggist. The recipe is best read as evidence of how a soda counter borrowed a flavor profile it admired and fitted it to the equipment and assumptions it already had.