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Egg Phosphate (Pour some cracked ice into)
Pour some cracked ice into a shaker, break in a fresh egg, add an ounce of American Orange Syrup and a dash of phosphate. Shake well, then strain into soda glass. Draw fine stream to make the drink creamy, then pour back and forth from shaker to glass. Sprinkle top with grated nutmeg, and serve with a straw. Egg phosphate can also be served with American Claret, Lemon, Champagne Syrups, or a mixture of American Lemon and Coffee, or Chocolate and Orange, or any specially prepared syrup.
A fountain standard from the era when every drugstore had a marble counter and a soda draft with several settings. The vocabulary needs translating, but the drink itself cannot be recommended as written.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole fresh egg is broken into the shaker and never heated at any point; shaking with ice does nothing to pathogens. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis both on the shell and within the yolk, and a drink built on a single unheated egg gives it a direct route to the glass. Anyone wanting an egg-based fountain drink today should follow a current recipe written around a pasteurised product.
- Acid phosphate is not phosphoric acid from the hardware shelf"Phosphate" at the fountain meant a dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold specifically as a beverage acid. It is still made for bar use. Undiluted or technical-grade acid is not a substitute and is corrosive.
- "A dash"On fountain equipment a dash came from a stoppered dash bottle; the quantity was small and varied with the bottle, on the order of a few drops to an eighth of a teaspoon. It is a sourness adjustment, not a structural ingredient.
- "American Orange Syrup" and the restThese read as cross-references to the book's own syrup formulas rather than branded products. All are sweet flavouring syrups; an ounce is about two tablespoons.
- "Draw fine stream"Fountain draft arms offered more than one stream, coarse and fine among them. The fine stream was a narrow, forceful jet of carbonated water aimed to whip air into the egg. A soda siphon gives the nearest equivalent; the pouring back and forth between shaker and glass is the same aeration trick by hand.
- NutmegGrated fresh over the foam, as with eggnog and milk punch. Pre-ground nutmeg sinks and tastes flat by comparison.
- YieldOne soda glass, served immediately with a straw. The foam is short-lived.
Egg drinks were the fountain's answer to a demand that was medical as much as social: through the second half of the nineteenth century the soda counter sat inside the pharmacy, and an egg beaten into flavoured syrup and charged water was sold as nourishment for the thin, the convalescent and the person who had skipped lunch. Acid phosphate, promoted from the 1870s onward as a tonic preparation, carried the same double identity, supplying the tartness that keeps a sweet syrup from cloying while lending the whole thing a druggist's respectability. The long list of interchangeable syrups at the end of this entry is the real tell about how such books worked: the dispenser learned one procedure and then rang the changes on it, so that claret, coffee-and-lemon and chocolate-and-orange versions all came off the same shaker. Prohibition later pushed still more custom toward these counters, and the egg phosphate survived into the mid-twentieth century alongside the egg cream -- a drink whose name is traditionally explained as a relic of a version once made with egg, though whether it ever contained one is disputed.