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Cream Puff
One of the Finest Egg Drinks Made.
Break a fresh egg into a shaker, draw an ounce of American Orange Syrup, add a good-sized spoonful of ice cream, and shake very thoroughly Then without straining, fill the shaker with fine stream. Pour from shaker to glass, top with grated nutmeg, and serve with a straw. Chocolate cream puff and coffee cream puff are also very fine. Made by using the syrups named instead of orange.
This is a fountain egg drink, and the egg is the whole point of it: broken raw into the shaker, shaken with syrup and ice cream, and served without ever seeing heat. That is why it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below are offered as a glossary to the original rather than as working instructions.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg goes into the shaker uncooked and is served immediately, with nothing in the drink acidic or alcoholic enough to matter. Raw shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella on the shell and in the interior, and shaking the egg into a cold beverage distributes it through every mouthful. Anyone wanting an egg-based fountain drink should follow a current recipe written around pasteurized egg.
- Fountain hygiene has no equivalent hereThe drink is shaken and poured "without straining," so anything that goes into the shaker, shell fragments included, ends up in the glass. Nothing in the sequence removes or heats what the raw egg brings with it.
- "Fine stream"The soda fountain's draft arm had two or more outlets: a coarse stream for force and agitation, a fine stream for gentle filling that preserved foam. Filling the shaker with fine stream meant charged carbonated water delivered slowly so the egg foam was not knocked flat.
- "An ounce of syrup"Fountain measure, drawn from the pump: one ounce is two tablespoons, and one full stroke of a standard syrup pump was usually calibrated to about that. American Orange Syrup was a sweetened orange flavouring syrup rather than plain juice.
- "A good-sized spoonful of ice cream"The fountain scoop or spade, not a table spoon; call it a small scoop. Its job here is fat and body.
- The nutmegGrated nutmeg on top of an egg drink is a fixture of the period, carried over from egg nogg and milk punch.
- YieldOne shaker, one glass, one drink. The chocolate and coffee variants are the same formula with the syrup swapped, no other change.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s devote whole chapters to "egg drinks," and they sat at the expensive end of the menu: an egg phosphate, egg lemonade, or egg nogg cost more than a plain soda and was sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure. The dispenser was a quasi-medical figure working behind a counter that had grown out of the drugstore, and a raw egg beaten into charged water was widely recommended to the thin, the convalescent and the overworked. The name "cream puff" is often said to borrow from the pastry only for its sense of something light and inflated, which is what vigorous shaking does to egg white in a syrup-and-soda base. Orange, chocolate and coffee were among the syrups a fountain would keep on hand, so offering the drink in all three took no extra stock, and the nutmeg garnish is generally traced back to the older tavern tradition of spiced egg and milk punches.