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Floating Island Punch
One ounce Catawba syrup, 1 ounce sherry syrup, white of 1 egg, 1 ounce sweet cream. Shake well and strain, using shaved ice in shaking. Use fine stream soda and serve same as egg phosphate. Top off with whipped cream and serve straws.
A fountain drink from the era when the soda clerk worked with a battery of flavoring syrups, a shaker, and a draft arm with several stream settings. Most of its vocabulary has vanished along with the marble counter, and its central ingredient is the reason it cannot be served now.
- Raw egg white is the problemThe egg white is shaken with ice and cold syrup and never heated at any stage. Whole shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, and no part of this procedure brings the white above refrigerator temperature, so nothing in the drink reduces that risk. A current recipe using a pasteurized product should be consulted instead.
- Catawba syrupFlavoring syrup based on the Catawba grape, an American native widely planted in Ohio and along the Finger Lakes in the nineteenth century. Fountain catalogs sold it ready-made; it is essentially a sweet grape syrup with a musky, foxy note.
- Sherry syrupA fountain syrup flavoured to taste of sherry. Fountain formularies gave recipes both with genuine sherry and with flavouring essence, and it should not be assumed that this one contained fortified wine.
- "Same as egg phosphate"A cross-reference to the book's egg-phosphate entry, which the reader is assumed to know. The recipe gives no detail beyond that, so the exact serving sequence has to be taken from that other entry rather than reconstructed here.
- Fine stream sodaThe fountain draught arm had more than one outlet, coarse and fine. This drink specifies the fine stream; in fountain practice the two streams were used for different stages of mixing and filling. There is no domestic equivalent beyond pouring carbonated water down the side of the glass.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is two tablespoons. The measured liquids total three fluid ounces, plus the egg white, so roughly four ounces go into the shaker before the soda; the finished drink is a single tall one. The recipe does not state a glass size.
- Shaved iceThe recipe calls for shaved rather than cracked or cubed ice in the shaker. Fountain ice was shaved from a block at the counter.
The name is often said to borrow from oeufs à la neige, a custard dessert related to the floating island of English cookbooks, in which beaten egg white floats in a pool of cream — here the foam cap standing above the soda plays the same visual trick. Drinks of this type belong to the golden age of the American drug-store fountain, roughly 1880 to 1920, when the soda clerk was expected to command a repertoire of hundreds of formulas and egg-and-cream builds were sold as nourishing tonics as much as refreshments. Syrups named for wines and grapes, Catawba and sherry among them, let fountains offer the suggestion of a cocktail, and it has been suggested that this commercial logic grew steadily more useful as local prohibition spread and then became national in 1920.