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Delight
One-half ounce strawberry syrup, 1½ ounce raspberry syrup, ½ ounce grape syrup, 1 egg, ½ ounces plain cream, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain egg drink of the shaken-to-order type, and one that never sees heat at any stage. The notes below explain the measures and then why the drink as written is off the table.
- Raw shell egg, unheatedThe whole egg goes into the shaker with cold syrup, cream and ice and is served immediately. Nothing in the sequence reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella in a contaminated egg, and the drink is not acidic enough to do anything either.
- The cream is the second problem"Plain cream" distinguishes it from whipped or sweetened cream; at this period it may well have been unpasteurised. Combined with a raw egg and served cold without any heat step, it is not a preserved ingredient.
- Volume of egg relative to the drinkHalf an ounce each of three syrups plus the cream (if read as an ounce and a half, see below) is about three ounces of liquid against a whole egg of roughly one and three-quarter ounces. This is not a trace of egg white for foam; the egg is a large share of the drink. If you want a fountain egg drink today, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs.
- What the measures meanFountain ounces are fluid ounces poured from a syrup pump, and a "glass" here is the mixing glass, so a quarter glass of ice is a couple of ounces of shaved or fine ice. The recipe as printed reads "½ ounces plain cream"; the plural suggests a dropped numeral, and one and a half ounces is the likely reading.
- "Toss" is a technique, not a flourishAfter shaking and straining, the drink was most likely thrown between two vessels held apart to aerate it and build a head, the motion later cocktail work calls throwing.
- YieldOne glass, roughly four to five ounces once aerated.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s carry a good many of these egg drinks, and "Delight" is typical of the genre: a name that tells you nothing, a stack of two or three fruit syrups, an egg for body, and cream for richness. The fountain in this period was pitched as a temperance rival to the saloon, and its egg drinks borrowed the vocabulary and the theatre of bar work directly, with the egg flip and egg nog often said to be the ancestors. Dispensers were also frequently pharmacists, and the egg-and-cream drinks were sold with a nutritive gloss, as something restorative for a customer who had skipped a meal, which is why they sit alongside beef-iron-and-wine tonics in the same trade catalogues. The practice of tossing a shaken drink between two vessels, called throwing, survives in bartending today; the raw-egg-over-the-counter habit did not, and pasteurized egg products may be part of why later versions of these drinks could carry on at all.