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Egg Punch
Break 1 egg in mixing glass, add 1 ounce Catawba syrup, 1½ ounces brandy syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, shake well with ice and use fine stream ; serve in bell glass.
A soda-fountain "punch" from the era when the dispenser's counter mimicked the bar. The mixing is simple; the problem is the egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Why this one failsThe whole raw egg is shaken with cold cream and cold syrup and served immediately, so nothing in the glass ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs of unknown handling served raw to the public is exactly the practice modern food codes were written to end. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, work from a current recipe.
- Raw cream as well"Plain cream" at a fountain of this date may well have been unpasteurized, kept in a jug on ice through a long service day, though pasteurized milk and cream were becoming more common. Raw egg combined with dairy held and poured over hours is a recognized route to foodborne illness.
- Catawba syrupA flavoring syrup based on the Catawba grape, an American variety of largely labrusca character, foxy and Concord-like. Nothing standard is sold under that name today; a grape syrup is the nearest equivalent in flavor terms.
- Brandy syrupFountain syrup books of the period give brandy syrup as a flavored syrup, some formulas using real brandy and others little or none, so how much alcohol a drink like this carried depended on the dispenser's own formula.
- "Use fine stream"An instruction to the dispenser, not a technique: the soda draught arm had coarse and fine streams, and the fine one was used to build foam on egg and cream drinks without breaking them down.
- Bell glassA footed, flaring fountain glass, tall enough to hold the head that the fine stream throws up; period sizes varied. The finished drink is a single serving.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain from the 1870s onward, sold as strengthening as much as refreshing: the egg, the cream and the sugar were understood as nourishment for clerks and shoppers who did not want, or could not get, a drink at a bar. Names borrowed openly from the saloon — punch, flip, sour, cocktail — while the alcohol was replaced by flavoring syrups, which is why a "brandy syrup" and a "punch" can appear together in a temperance-friendly book. The Catawba grape is the American note in the glass; it is generally traced to plantings around the Ohio River valley in the first half of the nineteenth century, where it became the basis of a substantial early American wine trade and, later, of the grape syrups and "Catawba" flavors that dispensers kept on the back bar.