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Egg Lunar Blend
Take 2 mixing glasses, break an egg, putting the yolk in 1 glass, the white in the other; into the glass with the yolk, add 1 ounce cherry syrup and some cracked ice, shake, add small quantity soda and strain into a 12-ounce glass. Into the other mixing glass add 1 ounce plain sweet cream and beat with bar spoon until well whipped, and ½ ounce lemon syrup; then transfer it into shaker and add soda from fine stream only, and float on top of the one containing the yolk and cherry. Serve with two straws.
This is a two-layer soda-fountain egg drink, and the problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: both halves of a raw shell egg go into the glass and neither is ever heated.
- The raw egg is the whole drinkThe yolk is shaken with cherry syrup and ice; the white is whipped with cream and lemon syrup and floated on top. No step in the procedure applies any heat, and the ice keeps the drink far below the 160F to which egg dishes are normally cooked for safety.
- Salmonella, specificallyIntact-shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis both on the shell and internally in the contents. Cracking an egg by hand and dividing it between two glasses brings shell surface into contact with the drink, and the syrups are nowhere near acidic or concentrated enough to do anything about it.
- Held and served coldA fountain drink is assembled and then sipped through straws over some minutes at fountain temperature rather than under refrigeration, and there is no cooking step at any point to reduce whatever is present.
- Who is most at riskEgg drinks were once prescribed as invalid food and given to children, the elderly and convalescents. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg beverage carries the highest risk of serious illness.
- Not a hot-fat-and-sharp-knife cautionWe do not flag ordinary kitchen hazards. This is flagged because there is no version of the written method that brings the egg to a safe temperature; the raw egg is not an incidental ingredient but the body and the float of the drink.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a source that addresses egg safety directly. We are not supplying revised quantities or temperatures for this one.
American soda fountains sold eggs as a matter of course: egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg chocolates built on the nineteenth-century belief that a raw egg beaten into a cold drink was a nourishing tonic as much as a treat, a fountain cousin to the sickroom eggnog and the beaten-egg "nourishment" of period household medicine. Fountain manuals of this kind gave the dispenser a repertoire of showy, differentiated drinks made from the same handful of bottled syrups, and the interest here appears to be largely in the presentation - the yolk tinted red with cherry syrup below, the whipped white and cream floated pale above, so the glass reads as two distinct bands. The recipe specifies two straws.