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Coffee Nog
Egg Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Simple Syrup, ½ ounces; American Coffee Extract, ¼ ounce; Port Wine, 1 ounce; Milk, 6 ounces. Shake well and fill tumbler with soda water, using fine stream. Serve in a 14-ounce tumbler, and with a spoon.
A fountain nog from the era when the soda clerk cracked a shell egg into the shaker and served the result unheated. The mixing is trivial; the egg is the problem.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedNothing in this drink reaches any temperature at all — the egg meets cold milk, cold syrup and cold soda water and goes straight into the glass. A raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that neither the port nor the acidity of the soda water will address. Use a current recipe if you want an egg nog.
- The first line is garbled"Egg Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful" almost certainly collapses two separate entries — one egg, and shaved ice to half a tumbler. As printed the quantity of egg is genuinely unstated, which is another reason not to work from this text.
- "Simple Syrup, ½ ounces"The measure here reads as fluid ounces; half a fluid ounce is a tablespoon. The plural "ounces" looks like a typesetting slip rather than a range.
- The tumbler as a measureA 14-ounce tumbler is the specified glass, and "½ tumblerful" of shaved ice therefore means about 7 ounces of loose ice by volume — considerably less by weight.
- American Coffee ExtractA concentrated coffee flavouring sold ready-made to fountains rather than brewed on the premises. A quarter ounce of it was expected to flavour fourteen ounces of drink, so it was strong stuff and not interchangeable with espresso spoon for spoon.
- "Fine stream"Fountain apparatus offered a coarse stream for volume and a fine stream for finishing. The fine stream was generally called for on milk and egg drinks, a hard jet of carbonated water being liable to curdle and foam the mixture over the rim.
- YieldOne 14-ounce drink, served with a spoon as the recipe directs.
Soda fountain nogs sat at the point where the drugstore counter borrowed from the bar. Egg drinks — flips, nogs, egg phosphates, egg lemonades — were sold as strengthening and nourishing rather than merely refreshing, part of the fountain's inherited identity as an arm of the pharmacy, and a raw egg beaten into milk was standard convalescent fare in nineteenth-century household medicine. The ounce of port here is a reminder that American fountain formulas used small quantities of wine and spirits quite openly before Prohibition; after 1920 books of this kind tended to reissue the same recipes with the wine dropped or replaced by a syrup. The coffee extract points the other way, toward the industrial supply houses that sold fountains ready-made flavour concentrates by the gallon, so that a clerk could turn out a coffee drink without ever brewing coffee.