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Egg Ade
Fill soda glass half full of cracked ice, add 1 ounce plain syrup, 1 egg, ½ ounce brandy, 1 dash angostura bitters. Shake well, then fill glass with ginger ale, and serve with a straw. Can also be served strained into a mineral glass.
This is a raw-egg fountain drink, and that single fact governs everything else about it. The notes below explain the fountain vocabulary and then why the drink cannot be made as printed.
- Raw egg, no kill stepA whole shell egg goes into the shaker and reaches the drinker uncooked. Salmonella in and on shell eggs is the specific risk, and nothing in the glass — ice, syrup, ginger ale — brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would address it. A current recipe using a product intended to be consumed raw should be used instead.
- The brandy does nothingHalf an ounce of brandy in a twelve-ounce glass works out to roughly one and a half to two percent alcohol by volume in the finished drink. Alcohol has no meaningful antimicrobial effect at that dilution, and the bitters even less.
- Who drank itFountain drinks were sold to everyone who walked in, including children, the elderly and convalescents — exactly the groups for whom an egg-borne infection is most dangerous. Egg drinks were in fact marketed as nourishment for the unwell.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" is simple syrup, generally cooked heavier than the one-to-one bar standard, though formulas varied from book to book. One ounce is two tablespoons.
- Fountain glasswareA soda glass of the period was the larger vessel, commonly around 10 to 12 ounces with a flared lip; a mineral glass was a smaller straight-sided tumbler. Sizes were not standardised, but the mineral glass being the smaller of the two is why the strained version fits.
- A dashA dash of Angostura from a period bitters bottle is a quick shake, conventionally reckoned at around an eighth of a teaspoon.
The soda fountain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of the pharmacy counter, and its drinks kept a medicinal accent long after the medicine had gone: egg drinks in particular were sold as restoratives, the fountain's answer to beef tea, on the reasoning that a raw egg was concentrated nourishment a weak stomach could take. "Ade" simply marks a long drink built on syrup and a carbonated or citrus base, as in lemonade, and the egg ades sat in the same family as the egg phosphate, the egg lemonade and the egg nogg that fountain manuals list beside them. The half ounce of brandy is consistent with a book compiled before national Prohibition, though it settles nothing on its own, since such recipes also appear in books published after repeal.