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Egg Lactart (Same as egg lemonade)
Same as egg lemonade, substituting 1½ teaspoonfuls of lactart for the lemon juice.
A one-line variant that only makes sense next to its parent recipe: egg lemonade at the fountain meant a whole raw egg shaken with sugar syrup, acid, shaved ice and water, strained into a glass and drunk immediately. The substitution here swaps the fruit acid for a bottled one.
- The raw egg is the problemNothing in this drink is ever heated. A whole shell egg shaken cold with syrup and acid carries a real Salmonella risk, and the fountain's ice and the acid do nothing to reduce it. Anyone wanting an egg drink today should follow a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs.
- What lactart wasLactart was a branded dilute lactic acid solution sold to soda fountains in the late nineteenth century as a stand-in for lemon juice. It gave sourness without fruit flavour or the cloudiness of citrus, and was marketed as keeping better than fresh juice.
- Not the same as lemon juiceLactic acid is generally described as softer and rounder on the palate than citric, and it brings no aroma at all. The recipe gives no indication of how, or whether, that difference was compensated for.
- The measurement is unclear"½ teaspoonfuls" is plural where it should be singular, and the strength of commercial lactart varied by supplier. There is no honest way to convert this to a modern food-grade lactic acid dose, since the original concentration is not stated.
The American soda fountain of the 1880s and 1890s sold acid drinks as much for their supposed tonic value as for refreshment, and the egg drinks sat at the nourishing end of the menu. Lactart belongs to the same commercial moment: a shelf-stable acidulant marketed to dispensers who wanted the sour bite of lemonade without buying, storing and squeezing fruit. Its appearance as a straight one-for-one substitution, with the rest of the recipe left to the page above, shows how fountain manuals were organised — a small core of base drinks, then dozens of one-line variants generated by swapping the acid, the syrup or the garnish. Lactic acid itself is still used as a food acidulant, but the brand and the counter it stood on are gone.