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Egg Strawberry
One egg in mixing glass, add 2 ounces of strawberry syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, shake well with ice; use fine stream and serve in bell glass.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink of the shaken, never-heated kind, and that single fact rules it out as written. The notes below explain the specific problem and decode the fountain vocabulary.
- The raw egg is the whole problemThe egg goes into the mixing glass whole and is shaken with cold syrup, cream and ice. Nothing in the procedure brings it anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in shell eggs is reliably destroyed, and the drink is served immediately. A shell egg cracked into a cold beverage and consumed is the classic vector for salmonellosis, and the risk is not trivial for children, older drinkers, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised. If you want a drink of this style, use a current recipe built for it.
- Cream in 1900 was not today's cartonCream at the fountain -- "Plain cream" at a soda fountain of this period was not a modern carton of pasteurised cream, and depending on place and date it may not have been pasteurised at all. Treat it as a second uncertainty in the glass alongside the egg.
- Fountain measuresFountain ounces are fluid ounces, so 2 ounces of syrup and 2 ounces of cream are a quarter cup each. That is a single drink, not a batch.
- "Strawberry syrup"Not a fruit puree. Fountain syrup was a heavy sweetened syrup, flavoured and coloured, made up in quantity at the fountain. Modern bottled dessert syrups are the nearest thing in sweetness.
- "Use fine stream"Fountain vocabulary rather than kitchen instruction: the carbonated-water draught arm had coarse and fine settings, and the fine stream is the one specified here. It indicates the drink was finished with soda water in the serving glass.
- "Bell glass"A flared, bell-shaped fountain glass, wide at the rim so a head of foam could stand above the drink. A large tumbler is the closest household equivalent.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through the 1920s, sold less as indulgence than as fortification: the fountain inherited the language of the drugstore it sat in, and an egg shaken into syrup and cream was marketed to the thin, the convalescent and the overworked clerk in much the same breath as a phosphate or a tonic. Whole families of them appear in fountain manuals of this period, from egg lemonades and egg phosphates to egg chocolate and egg malteds, all built on the same move of cracking a shell egg into the mixing glass and shaking it to a foam with ice. Strawberry recurs across these books in so many combinations. The mid-century "egg cream," which contains no egg, is sometimes traced to this family of drinks, though the origin of the name is disputed and other explanations circulate.