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Glasgow Flip
One-half ounce cherry syrup, ½ ounce orange syrup, ½ ounce sherbet syrup, 1½ ounces plain cream, 1 egg, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain flip of the shaken-egg school, from the era when a drugstore counter kept a bowl of shell eggs beside the syrup rail. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the drink itself is not one to build today.
- Why it fails: the raw eggThe whole egg goes into the shaker and is never heated at any point. Shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that shaking with cold syrup and ice does nothing to reduce, and the drink is served immediately at room temperature or below. If you want an egg flip, use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- The cream compounds it"Plain cream" at a fountain of this period simply meant dairy cream, which may or may not have been pasteurized. Raw egg together with possibly unpasteurized cream adds to the risk.
- Sherbet syrupNot frozen sherbet. In fountain usage "sherbet" generally meant an acidulated sweet syrup, often lemon-flavoured and made sour with an edible acid, giving a sharp lemon-sour note. Nothing on a modern shelf is a direct equivalent.
- Fountain measuresAn ounce here is a fluid ounce of syrup. "One-quarter glass ice" means the serving glass filled a quarter with cracked ice; the recipe does not state the glass size, so the volume cannot be pinned down.
- Shake, strain, toss"Toss" is the fountain man's flourish: the strained drink was thrown between two vessels held apart to aerate the egg and raise a head of foam. It was showmanship as much as technique.
- ScaleThree ounces of syrup and cream, plus an egg and ice, makes a single small glass: one serving.
A flip was originally a hot tavern drink, ale or spirits sweetened and plunged with a red-hot loggerhead, with egg becoming a common addition later, and the name carried over into the nineteenth-century bar to mean any drink shaken with a whole egg. When soda fountains grew into the social centres of American towns, they took the bar's repertoire and rebuilt it without alcohol, so a flip became syrup, cream and egg worked up in a shaker; egg drinks were widely advertised as nourishing, a glass of breakfast for a clerk with no time to sit down. Fountain manuals of this kind ran to hundreds of such formulas, most of them differing only in the syrup combination and christened for whatever sounded well on a placard, so a Glasgow Flip almost certainly owes its name to the fashion for city and country labels rather than to anything Scottish in the glass.