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Egg Phosphate Syrup (This makes a most delicious)
This makes a most delicious hot egg phosphate as well as cold. For hot egg phosphate the syrup should be used clear and not diluted. Pour 1 ounce of the American Egg Phosphate Syrup into an egg shaker, and 1 ounce cold water and a fresh egg, shake thoroughly and strain into shaker glass. Pour back into shaker, fill shaker with hot water, constantly stirring. Pour into 9-ounce hot soda mug. Garnish the top with American Regal Ground Spices and serve.
A soda-fountain drink from the era when the counter served hot beverages through the winter as well as cold ones in summer. The vocabulary needs translating, but the central problem is the egg.
- Raw egg, never cookedA whole fresh egg is broken into the shaker and combined with cold water and syrup; the only heat it ever meets is hot tap or urn water poured over it in a metal shaker. That will not bring the egg anywhere near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella, and the mixture is diluted and cooling from the moment it is poured. This is an uncooked-egg drink in everything but appearance.
- Why the hot water does not helpHot water from a fountain urn immediately loses heat to the shaker, the syrup, the cold water and the egg. The finished mug would sit below pasteurisation temperature, and the shaking that aerates the egg also cools it. There is no holding time at any temperature here at all.
- Shell eggs of 1900Shell eggs then and now -- Modern Salmonella Enteritidis can be present inside an intact, clean, fresh shell egg, which is precisely the risk this method cannot address. If a raw-egg fountain drink is wanted, work from a current recipe built around pasteurised eggs.
- "American Egg Phosphate Syrup"Evidently a branded product rather than something the dispenser made, presumably the book's own house line. It would have been a flavoured syrup carrying acid phosphate, the tart phosphate solution that gave phosphates their name and their dry bite. Acid phosphate itself is still made for bartenders and is a food ingredient, not the hazard here.
- Ounces and the mugAll the ounces are fluid ounces. The recipe specifies a 9-ounce hot soda mug, and directs that for the hot version the syrup be used clear and undiluted.
- The egg shakerThe recipe distinguishes an "egg shaker" from the "shaker glass", and has the drink strained out of one and poured back into the other; the straining step would catch shell fragments and any unbroken egg.
- Ground spices"American Regal Ground Spices" was another branded product, dusted over the top in the manner of an eggnog.
Phosphates were the sharp cousin of the soda-fountain syrup drink: a dose of acid phosphate stood in for citrus, giving a sour edge that did not turn the syrup cloudy. Egg drinks were sold at the same counters as tonics as much as treats, on the common view of the period that a raw egg beaten into a beverage was a restorative, and hot versions gave the fountain something to sell in cold weather, when nobody wanted a cold soda. Books like this one were issued by syrup manufacturers as much for advertising as for instruction, which is why the formula names two branded products rather than telling the dispenser how to make either. The recipe is a good reminder of how much food safety practice around shell eggs has changed since.