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Egg Armour
Chocolate Syrup, 2 ounces; Egg, 1; Sweet Cream, 2 ounces. Cracked Ice a little Malted Milk, 1 teaspoonful.
Shake well, add small stream to fill glass, sprinkle top with small quantity of salt and serve with a straw.
A fountain egg drink of the classic type: chocolate, cream, malted milk and a whole raw egg shaken over ice and lengthened with soda water. The raw egg is the problem, and it is not incidental to the drink.
- The raw eggThe whole egg is never heated at any point; shaking with cracked ice takes it further from a safe temperature, not closer. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally. If you want a modern egg cream or malted, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg.
- "Small stream to fill glass"Most likely the fine stream from a soda fountain's carbonated water draught arm, aimed to blend rather than foam over; the recipe does not name the liquid, but it is not more milk or syrup. On that reading the soda makes up most of the volume of the finished glass.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesTwo ounces of chocolate syrup is a quarter cup; two ounces of sweet cream is the same. "Sweet cream" simply means unsoured cream, not sweetened.
- Malted milkA teaspoonful of malted milk powder, the malt-and-milk-solids product sold in bulk to fountains. Modern malted milk powder is its descendant, though many current versions are sweeter.
- The saltThe pinch on top is a finishing sprinkle; the recipe gives no reason for it, though salt would sharpen the chocolate and cut the eggy richness.
- YieldOne glass, served with a straw. Nothing in the method scales to a batch, since the drink is built and finished individually.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through the 1920s, sitting somewhere between refreshment and tonic. A whole egg beaten into milk, cream or soda was widely understood as strengthening food for invalids, convalescents and thin children, and fountain operators sold it on that reputation as much as on flavour: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg malteds and egg chocolates were all part of the fountain's repertoire. "Armour" in the name is sometimes read as signalling the same idea of fortification, though it may equally be a proper name or trade reference. Malted milk, a powdered malt-and-milk preparation that came into commercial production in the 1880s, slotted into that thinking neatly and became one of the fountain's signature ingredients. The habit faded as soda fountains gave way to packaged soft drinks, and as public health understanding of raw eggs caught up with the practice.