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Egg-Nog (Cognac syrup ounce Jamaica)
Cognac syrup, 1 ounce; Jamaica ginger wine, ½ ounce cracked ice, small quantity; powdered sugar, small quantity; white and yolk of 1 egg. Shake well, then add sweet milk sufficient to fill tumbler. Shake again and serve with little nutmeg. Do not have your syrup too thick as it does not mix well.
A fountain egg-nog from the era when the soda clerk broke a whole shell egg into the shaker and served it at once. The drink is never heated at any stage, and that is the problem with it today.
- Raw egg, no kill stepBoth white and yolk go into the shaker and the tumbler goes straight to the customer. Nothing in the glass reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg. Use a current recipe if you want an egg-nog.
- The alcohol will not helpAt a soda fountain "cognac syrup" and "Jamaica ginger wine" were most likely flavouring syrups and essences rather than spirits, so there is probably little ethanol here to work on the egg (essences were often alcohol-based, but not in amounts that would matter at this dose). Even in a genuinely spirituous nog the alcohol content is well below what would reliably make raw egg safe, and what effect there is takes weeks of refrigerated ageing.
- Milk that sits outPresumably the milk was cold and the glass went straight across the counter. Made at home and left standing while you fuss with nutmeg, an egg-and-milk drink is close to an ideal growth medium at room temperature.
- Cognac syrupA commercial fountain syrup sold to imitate brandy, usually built on a sugar syrup with cognac oil or essence. Nothing on a modern shelf corresponds to it directly.
- Jamaica ginger wineApparently another fountain syrup, sharing a name with the ginger "wines" and with the patent extract of Jamaica ginger. Sweet and hot with ginger; whether the fountain version carried any alcohol is not clear from the recipe.
- TumblerThe recipe gives no capacity, so the milk is simply however much fills the glass on top of 1½ ounces of syrup, an egg and cracked ice. One drink.
- The syrup noteThe closing instruction is the one piece of technique here: heavy-density syrup ropes rather than disperses when shaken with cold milk, and it will streak the glass and settle at the bottom.
American soda fountains sold egg drinks in enormous numbers from the 1880s through the 1920s, and manuals like this one carry whole chapters of them: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg creams and fountain egg-nogs. They were marketed as nourishment as much as refreshment, a glass of milk and an egg dressed up with syrup for people who would not sit down to breakfast, and druggists who kept the fountain in the front of the store are often said to have blurred the line between soda and tonic. The "cognac" and "Jamaica ginger" here are flavour essences standing in for the spirits of a tavern nog, which suggests, though the manual does not say so, that the fountain version let a temperance-minded customer drink something that tasted like the holiday article. Egg drinks faded from fountain menus as the fountains themselves gave way to bottled soft drinks.