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Egg Coffee
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Fresh Egg, 1; Coffee Syrup, 1½ ounces; Cream (genuine), 2¼; Spring Water, 5. Shake thoroughly. Draw small quantity soda water, fine stream only. Egg Cream Fresh Egg, 1; Vanilla Syrup, 2 ounces; Whipped Cream, 1 ounce; Sherry Wine from squirter, 2 drams. The use of whipped cream makes this a specially smooth and delicious drink. Garnish with grated nutmeg.
Two fountain formulas run together here, both built on a whole raw egg shaken into a cold drink and served immediately. That is the reason this page is worth reading rather than mixing.
- Why the cautionA whole fresh egg is shaken into iced liquid and drunk without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs in 1900 were assumed clean if fresh; today the risk sits inside the egg itself, and no amount of shaking, acid syrup or sherry addresses it. Use a current recipe if you want an egg-based fountain drink.
- The sherry is not the problemTwo drams is about a quarter of a fluid ounce, a trivial amount. It flavours the Egg Cream and does nothing at all to make the raw egg safe.
- The bare numbersCream "2¼" and spring water "5" are almost certainly fluid ounces, the unit having been stated once already in the 1½ ounces of coffee syrup. A dram here is the fluid dram, 1/8 fluid ounce.
- Tumbler and shaved iceFountain tumblers varied in size, so half a tumblerful of shaved ice is only loosely quantifiable, a few ounces by volume — packed shaved ice rather than cubes, so it chills fast and dilutes as it goes.
- Coffee syrupNot coffee. It was a sweetened concentrate boiled down from strong infusion with sugar, sometimes with chicory, and kept behind the counter. Bottled coffee syrup is still made in Rhode Island and is the nearest surviving equivalent.
- Cream (genuine)The parenthesis appears to distinguish real dairy cream from the period's substitutes, such as condensed milk and thickened "cream" preparations. What grade of cream fountains used is not specified here.
- The squirterA fountain bottle fitted to dispense small measured squirts of flavouring or wine, here about two drams' worth.
- "Fine stream only"Fountain taps had a coarse stream for filling and a fine one for finishing. Egg and cream drinks were topped with the fine stream because a hard jet of carbonated water breaks the foam the shaking has just built.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through the 1920s, sitting in the same column as phosphates, lemonades and ice-cream sodas, and they carried a distinctly medicinal reputation: the egg was sold as nourishment, something to build up a thin customer or steady an invalid, which is why fountain manuals list them alongside beef-tea and malted milk. The pairing with coffee syrup reflects how coffee typically reached the fountain — commonly not brewed to order but held as a keeping syrup that could be measured out like any other flavour. The dram of sherry in the second formula dates the book to before national Prohibition, when a soda fountain could keep a little wine in a squirter for flavouring without thinking of itself as a bar; after 1920 such lines are said to have disappeared from the manuals or been reprinted with the wine struck out.