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Egg Flip (White and yolk of egg lemon)
White and yolk of 1 egg lemon syrup, ½ ounce Catawba syrup, 1 ounce; liquid phosphate, ½ teaspoonful. Shake well, then add plain soda, enough to fill glass. Mix well by pouring from tumbler to shaker, strain through julep strainer into tumbler, then add a little grated nutmeg and serve.
A fountain egg flip in the classic style: a whole raw egg shaken with syrups, acid phosphate and soda water. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the drink itself cannot be recommended as written.
- The raw egg is the problemBoth white and yolk go in uncooked and the drink is never heated at any stage; the soda water and the small dose of phosphate do not pasteurise anything. A whole shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella in the yolk and on the shell, and a shaken, strained, chilled drink offers no step that reduces it. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg.
- Punctuation in the originalThe ingredient list has lost a semicolon in setting. Read it as: white and yolk of 1 egg; lemon syrup, ½ ounce; Catawba syrup, 1 ounce; liquid phosphate, ½ teaspoonful.
- Liquid phosphateAcid phosphate, a dilute phosphoric acid solution used at the fountain as a sour agent in place of citrus. It is still made for the cocktail and soda trade. Half a teaspoon is a small, tart accent, not a preservative.
- Catawba syrupA flavouring syrup based on the Catawba grape, an American native cultivar once central to Ohio and Finger Lakes winemaking. Non-alcoholic at the fountain. Nothing on a supermarket shelf tastes quite like it; ordinary grape syrup is far more candied.
- Plain sodaUnflavoured carbonated water drawn from the fountain, typically served very cold and briskly carbonated. The recipe gives no glass size: "enough to fill glass" leaves the measure to whatever tumbler the fountain used.
- Julep strainerThe perforated bowl-shaped strainer that sits in the mouth of a mixing glass. Here it would serve to hold back any shell fragments and the ropier bits of white while letting the foam through.
- Pouring from tumbler to shakerThe throw, not a shake. Passing the liquid between vessels aerates the egg without knocking all the carbonation out of the soda, which a hard shake would.
Egg flips began as a hot tavern drink — ale or spirits with sugar, often though not always with egg, warmed with a red-hot iron called a loggerhead — and the name followed the egg rather than the alcohol when the soda fountain took the form over in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s the American drugstore fountain was a temperance institution as much as a commercial one, and its egg drinks were sold with a straight face as nourishment: an egg, sugar and something sour, for clerks and shoppers who wanted a restorative without going into a saloon. The acid phosphate in this glass is the marker of that era. Fountain dispensers valued it for its clean, dry sourness, and it fell out of general use only when the trade itself contracted in the mid-twentieth century. Catawba syrup points the same direction, toward a period when a named American grape was a recognisable flavour to anyone standing at a marble counter.