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Egg Tonic
Fresh Egg, 1; Ginger Syrup, 1 ounce; Orange Syrup, 1 ounce; Angostura Bitters, 2 drams.
A fountain formula of the type printed by the hundred in trade manuals: proportions only, on the assumption that the dispenser knew to break the egg into the glass, add the syrups and bitters, shake with shaved ice and draw soda into it. The reason not to make it has nothing to do with technique.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes in unheated. Nothing in the drink reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell. The fountain trade of this period predated any understanding of that risk.
- Shaken and served, not heldNot a drink to hold -- Even a brief stand in a warm shop lets any contamination multiply in a sugar-rich, near-neutral egg mixture.
- Sold as a health drinkThe word "tonic" is the point of this formula: it was dispensed as a restorative, which makes the raw egg the more troubling. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg.
- A dram of bittersA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3.7 ml, so two drams is close to a modern teaspoon and a half. That is a heavy hand with Angostura by present-day bar standards and tells you the drink was meant to taste medicinal.
- Fountain syrupsGinger and orange syrup here mean the shop's own flavoured sugar syrups, generally much heavier than a modern 1:1 simple syrup.
Egg drinks were a fixture of the American soda fountain, and they were understood as nourishment rather than refreshment; a raw egg beaten into something sweet was standard convalescent fare in nineteenth-century domestic medicine, and the fountain simply took over a job the sickroom had been doing for decades. The Angostura is the tell that this belongs to the "tonic" end of the menu: the bitters, generally traced to Dr. Johann Siegert's practice in Angostura, Venezuela, in the 1820s, were sold in the United States as a stomachic and appetite stimulant long before they became chiefly a cocktail ingredient, and pairing them with ginger, another traditional digestive, gave the drink a plausible medical face at a time when the druggist and the soda dispenser were often the same man behind the same counter.