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Egg Flipped
One whole egg, ½ ounce lemon syrup, 1 ounce Catawba syrup, ½ teaspoonful liquid phosphate. Shake and fill glass with plain soda. Mix by pouring from glass to shaker, strain into glass, add grated nutmeg and serve. Simple Syrup is the basis of all soda water syrups and the formula for making it is given in this book.
A fountain egg drink of the classic type: a whole raw egg shaken with flavoring syrups, acid phosphate and carbonated water. The terminology is worth unpacking even though the drink itself is not one to reproduce.
- Why the cautionThe egg is never heated at any stage — it is shaken cold with syrup and soda and poured straight into the glass. A raw shell egg can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the yolk, and nothing in this procedure reduces that risk.
- Not an alcoholic flipA soda-fountain "flip" borrowed the name from the tavern drink but contained no spirits. The defining gesture is the flipping itself: pouring the mixture back and forth between shaker and glass to aerate it and build a head.
- Liquid phosphateThis is acid phosphate — a dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to fountains as a souring agent. It gives a dry tartness that citric acid does not, and it is still made for the cocktail trade.
- Catawba syrupFlavoring syrup based on the Catawba grape, an American variety with a distinctly foxy, musky character. Catawba is still grown; where it is not to be had, Concord grape syrup is the nearest widely available equivalent in flavor terms.
- Plain sodaAt the fountain this meant carbonated water drawn from the apparatus, often with some force. Bottled seltzer is the practical equivalent.
- Simple syrupThe cross-reference is to the book's own base formula, given elsewhere in the volume. Fountain simple syrups generally ran heavier than the bar standard, and cream of tartar was sometimes added to discourage crystallizing.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe does not state the size.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain from the 1870s through Prohibition, occupying a curious middle ground between refreshment and tonic — the egg was understood as nourishment, and "egg phosphates," egg lemonades and egg flips were recommended to the thin and the overworked as much as to the thirsty. The name flip descends from the colonial tavern drink of beer, rum and sugar mulled with a hot loggerhead, but by the time it reached the marble counter it had shed its alcohol and kept only the frothy texture and the grating of nutmeg on top. Catawba, the grape flavoring here, points to the Ohio Valley and the Finger Lakes, where the variety was widely planted in the nineteenth century and sold as juice and syrup as well as wine. Acid phosphate, meanwhile, arrived through the patent-medicine trade — it was promoted as a nerve tonic before dispensing chemists discovered it simply made soda taste better.