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Egg Cocoa
Take 1 teaspoonful of American powdered cocoa, dissolve it in ¼ of a glass of hot water, add 2 or 3 spoonfuls of sugar, according to taste, put in 1 egg, and shake it together with cracked ice. Costs about 2½ cents. Sell for 10 cents.
A fountain drink from the era when a shaken raw egg was standard counter fare. The reason it cannot be reproduced as printed is the egg, and no adjustment of the other ingredients changes that.
- Raw shell egg, no heat at any pointThe whole egg goes into a cold shaker with ice and is served immediately. Nothing in the drink reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg. Cocoa, sugar and ice have no antimicrobial effect whatever.
- Why the fountain got away with itWhy the fountain served it -- Egg drinks were routine counter fare, and there was little or no surveillance that would have linked illness back to a fountain, so we simply do not know how often it caused trouble. Use a current recipe if you want an egg-based cocoa drink.
- "American powdered cocoa"Most likely plain unsweetened cocoa of the natural, non-alkalised sort, in contrast to the Dutch-process cocoas then sold as an import. Natural cocoa is more acidic and sharper in flavour.
- A glass, not a cupFountain work was measured in the soda glass, commonly around 8 to 10 ounces, so a quarter glass of hot water is roughly 2 to 2½ ounces. The size of the sugar "spoonfuls" is not specified.
- The dissolving stepThe hot water is there for one reason: cocoa powder will not wet out in a cold shaker and would sit in gritty specks. Any adaptation of this style of drink still has to hydrate the cocoa in something hot first.
- The economicsTwo and a half cents of goods sold for ten, a fourfold margin, and the note is aimed at the proprietor rather than the cook. It is a useful reminder that these books were trade manuals, not domestic cookery.
The American Soda Book belongs to the trade literature of the drug-store fountain, which by the 1890s had become a serious retail business with its own equipment catalogues, syrup suppliers and price guides. Egg drinks were a large part of that trade: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg creams and egg cocoas were sold as much for nourishment as for refreshment, in a period when a shaken raw egg was widely regarded as a tonic for invalids, clerks and anyone thought to be run down. The pairing with cocoa reflects the cheapening of cocoa powder over the course of the nineteenth century, following the invention of the cocoa press in 1828, which put a tin of it within reach of any fountain. The printed cost-and-sell line is the giveaway that this is a counterman's formula rather than a household one, and it records a fourfold margin.