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Chocolate Puff
Mixing glass, 2 ounces plain, sweet cream, add the white of 1 egg, whip with a bar spoon until it is well whipped, add ½ ounces chocolate syrup, transfer into shaker and add soda from both streams; then pour from shaker to 12-ounce glass and serve without straws.
A fountain drink of the shaken-egg school, written for a dispenser standing at a marble counter with carbonated water on tap. Most of it translates directly; the egg does not.
- Raw egg whiteThe white of one egg goes into the glass uncooked and stays uncooked. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and nothing in this drink brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would kill it. This is why the recipe carries a caution; a current recipe using pasteurised egg white should be consulted instead.
- "Soda from both streams"Fountain carbonated water was drawn through a two-way draught arm: a coarse stream to drive and foam the mixture, and a fine stream to fill and settle it. On a home siphon or seltzer bottle there is only one stream, and the drink foams far less.
- Plain, sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, not sugared. Two ounces is a quarter cup. Fountain "sweet cream" was generally a lighter cream than modern heavy whipping cream, though the fat content is not specified here.
- The bar spoonA long-handled spoon holding roughly a teaspoon. Whipping cream and egg white together with one is a matter of aeration, not volume; the mixture should be frothy and pourable, never stiff.
- Chocolate syrupFountain chocolate syrup of the period was typically cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a heavy syrup. Half an ounce is a tablespoon.
- The 12-ounce glassA standard soda glass of the era, and the reason the proportions look thin: cream and syrup together are under three ounces, and carbonated water makes up the rest. Yield is one drink.
- No strawsThe recipe specifies serving without them. The likely reason is the foam head: drinking from the rim takes the foam with the liquid, whereas a straw draws from beneath it.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries divided their drinks into families by texture as much as flavour: the plain soda, the ice cream soda, the frappe, the egg drink and the "puff," a small foamy glass built on cream and white of egg without ice cream. Egg whites were a common fountain ingredient, valued for the head they threw when hit with carbonated water at pressure, the same property bartenders relied on for fizzes across the street. Dispensing was a recognised trade with its own trade press, and books like this one were written as counter references, which is why the instruction reads as a sequence of motions rather than a list of ingredients. The use of raw egg at the fountain declined through the twentieth century as pasteurisation and food-safety regulation reshaped what could be served over a counter.