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Egg, 1
Add milk enough to nearly fill a glass. Shake well, fill glass with soda water, drawing fine stream. Grate nutmeg on top and serve.
This is the tail end of a soda-fountain egg drink: the egg and syrup went into the glass in an earlier step, and what survives here is the finishing. The raw egg is the problem, and it is not a fixable one within the recipe as printed.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe title places this among the egg drinks, and nothing in the surviving text applies heat: milk is added, the glass is shaken, and it is served cold. An egg in a drink built this way never approaches the 160F at which Salmonella in egg is reliably killed.
- Why 1900 accepted the riskWhy the period accepted the risk -- Egg drinks were sold as invalid food and tonic, and the risk was simply not understood in the terms we use now. Internal contamination of intact, clean-looking modern shell eggs is well documented. If you want a drink of this kind, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or carton egg product.
- Shaking is not a safeguardVigorous shaking and the acidity of a fruit syrup do nothing meaningful to egg pathogens on the timescale of a drink served immediately. Neither does the carbonic acid in soda water.
- "Drawing fine stream"Fountain apparatus of the period had two draws: a coarse stream for volume and a fine stream for a gentler finish that preserved foam. Here the fine stream is called for at the finish so the head is not blown flat.
- Soda waterThe glass is filled only "nearly" with milk to leave headroom for the soda. Any commercial sparkling water is the modern equivalent, though it will not foam the same way.
- YieldOne drink; the recipe specifies only "a glass."
Soda fountains sold egg drinks for decades as much for their reputed nourishment as for their flavor; egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg chocolates and plain "egg sodas" appear throughout dispensers' manuals of the 1890s and 1900s. The grated nutmeg on top is generally traced to eggnog, milk punch and the older posset tradition, where nutmeg was the near-universal garnish for anything combining egg with milk. That this entry is numbered "Egg, 1" and begins mid-procedure suggests, though one can only guess, what kind of book this is: a working reference for a dispenser standing behind the counter, who already knew that an egg and a measure of syrup went into the glass first and needed reminding only of the finish.