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Egg Calisaya
Egg, 1; Lemon Syrup, 2 ounces; Elixir Calisaya, 1 ounce; Acid Phosphate from squirter, 1 dram. Shake well.
A soda-fountain egg drink from the era when the druggist and the bartender were the same person. Two of its four ingredients put it outside what can be handed to a modern reader as written.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg is shaken cold, with nothing in the glass that will pasteurise it. Acid phosphate and lemon syrup lower the pH but do not kill Salmonella, and no stage of this drink reaches a temperature that does.
- Elixir Calisaya is a drug preparationCalisaya is the bark of Cinchona calisaya, and the elixir was a compounded pharmacy product carrying quinine and related cinchona alkaloids, usually in a sweetened alcoholic base. It was a formulary preparation dispensed by druggists rather than a grocery item, and an ounce per glass is closer to a medicinal quantity than a flavouring one. Quinine is now a prescription drug in the United States, and cinchona extracts in beverages are limited by law.
- Acid phosphateA dilute solution of phosphoric acid partly neutralised with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, dispensed at the fountain from a small bottle called a squirter. It gave a dry, mineral sourness that citric acid does not, and it is still made commercially for bar use.
- A dramA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml, or roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon. The measure marks the recipe as a pharmacist's, not a cook's.
- Two ounces of lemon syrupFountain syrups of the period were generally much heavier than a modern 1:1 simple syrup, so this is a sweet drink built to carry a bitter medicinal elixir.
- If you want the drinkWork from a current recipe using pasteurised egg and a permitted bitter cordial. The historical formula is worth reading, not reproducing.
Calisaya bark reached American pharmacies from Bolivia and Peru as a standard source of quinine, and by the later nineteenth century "Elixir Calisaya" was a fixture of the dispensary shelf, prescribed as a bitter tonic for poor appetite, malaria and the vague nineteenth-century diagnosis of debility. The soda fountain sat in the same room as that shelf, which is why a book of fountain formulas treats a dosed elixir as just another flavouring alongside lemon syrup. Egg drinks were the other half of the logic: shaken whole eggs were sold across the counter as nourishment for invalids and thin children, the fountain's answer to a meal in a glass. Acid phosphate is generally traced to Horsford's Acid Phosphate, devised by the chemist Eben Norton Horsford and sold by the Rumford Chemical Works from the 1870s, and it supplied both the tartness and a further claim to be doing the drinker good. The result is a drink that is equal parts refreshment, medicine and breakfast, and it tells you how completely the American drugstore of the period blurred those categories.