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Egg Milk
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Fresh Egg, 1; Rich Milk, 3 ounces; Spring Water, 5 ounces; Sugar (powdered), 3 teaspoonfuls. Shake thoroughly. Draw small quantity of soda water, fine stream only, and grate a little nutmeg on top.
This is a soda-fountain drink built on a whole raw egg and unheated milk, neither of which is brought anywhere near a safe temperature. The notes below explain the terms and the risk rather than adapting the formula.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg is shaken into the glass and served immediately, with no cooking step and no acid or alcohol of any consequence. Salmonella can be present inside an intact, clean-looking egg, and a cold drink held over ice does nothing to reduce it. Anyone making an egg drink today should work from a current recipe using pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg.
- "Rich milk" meant raw milk"Rich milk" — in the fountain trade "rich" meant high in cream. Depending on time and place the milk may well have been unpasteurized, which combined with an uncooked egg is a combination modern food safety practice rules out.
- TumblerfulSoda-fountain tumblers of the era varied, commonly somewhere around 8 to 12 ounces, so half a tumblerful of shaved ice is perhaps 4 to 6 ounces by volume — a loose measure, not a precise one, and it dilutes the drink as it melts.
- Spring waterBottled still water rather than a flavoring ingredient; tap water of the period was variable in taste and quality.
- "Draw a fine stream only"Fountain apparatus offered a coarse stream for filling and a fine stream for finishing. The fine stream carbonates the drink gently, which with a shaken egg avoids excessive foaming.
- Powdered sugarHere this means finely ground sugar rather than the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. It was used because it dissolved in a cold shaken drink where granulated sugar would settle.
- YieldOne glass; roughly 8 ounces of liquid plus ice and a small quantity of soda.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain, sold less as indulgences than as fortifying tonics — the fountain occupied a genuinely ambiguous space between the drugstore and the lunch counter. An "egg milk," "egg phosphate" or "egg lemonade" was the sort of thing recommended to the thin, the convalescent and the overworked, on the widely held view that a raw egg was concentrated nourishment that could be taken when solid food could not. The grating of nutmeg on top links the drink directly to older eggnogs and milk punches, where the same spice had long been used with raw egg. Formularies like this one give their quantities in ounces, and the instruction assumes a two-speed draught arm at the elbow.