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Egg Coffee, Hot
One egg, 1 dessertspoonful condensed coffee, 1 teaspoonful sweet cream, 1 ounce syrup. Shake well, strain and add 1 cupful hot soda and 1 teaspoonful whipped cream.
A fountain drink built the way a soda clerk built everything: shaken cold in a mixing glass, strained, then lengthened with hot water from the urn. The problem is the egg, which never gets near a temperature that would make it safe.
- Why it fails todayA whole raw egg is shaken with syrup and cream, strained, and then diluted with about a cup of hot soda water. Even with water straight from the urn, the mixture lands below the 160F needed to kill Salmonella, and it is held there for seconds, not minutes. The egg is warmed, not cooked. If you want a hot coffee-and-egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg or a cooked custard base.
- DessertspoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon: reckon it at 2 teaspoons. It turns up in fountain formularies for syrups and extracts.
- Condensed coffeeA coffee concentrate kept in a fountain bottle, closer to modern coffee syrup or a thick cold-brew concentrate than to brewed coffee. Fountain versions were generally sweetened, which may be why only an ounce of plain syrup is added alongside.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream and buttermilk also in kitchen use. It says nothing about fat content; heavy cream is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Hot sodaNot carbonated water. Fountains ran a separate hot-water tap, often drawing on the same tank that heated the chocolate and beef-tea drinks; carbonation would have foamed uncontrollably and gone flat anyway. Read it as a cup of very hot water.
- YieldOne drink; the ingredients add up to something over ten ounces. Hot soda drinks were commonly served in a heavy mug or in a glass set in a metal holder.
Hot soda was the winter half of the fountain trade. From the 1880s onward American druggists kept their counters busy through cold months with hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot lemonade, clam bouillon and coffee drinks, all drawn from a heated tank beside the carbonated one. Egg drinks ran through the whole repertoire, hot and cold alike: a raw egg shaken into a beverage was widely regarded as nourishment rather than indulgence, and egg phosphates and egg coffees are often said to have been offered to customers thought to need building up. The soda fountain sat inside a pharmacy, and its drinks were marketed with one foot in the tonic tradition, which may be part of what explains the egg here.