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Hasty Pudding
One egg, 1 ounce of pineapple syrup, 2 dashes of lemon juice, 1 ounce of sweet cream, shaved ice; shake well. Add mostly a fine stream. Strain into a fancy glass. Top off with nutmeg if so desired.
A soda-fountain egg drink of the shaken sort, named after a dessert it does not otherwise resemble. It cannot be recommended as written, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- The egg is never cookedThe whole egg goes into the shaker with ice, syrup and cream and is strained straight into the glass. Nothing in the procedure brings it near the temperature at which Salmonella is destroyed, and the drink is served immediately to be drunk cold. Anyone wanting a modern egg-based fountain drink should follow a current recipe using pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg.
- Cream, tooCream at a period soda fountain would not reliably have been pasteurised, and combined with raw egg and held at fountain temperature it carries the same risk as the egg does.
- "Add mostly a fine stream"Garbled fountain shorthand, most likely for adding carbonated water from the fountain in a thin stream, which is what raises the head of foam. On that reading no ingredient is missing but the soda water.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce is two tablespoons. So the drink is 2 tbsp pineapple syrup, 2 tbsp cream, a whole egg, and a squeeze of lemon — a single small glass, not a shared one.
- Pineapple syrupNot canned pineapple juice. Fountain syrups were heavy sugar syrups flavoured with fruit or fruit extract, roughly the consistency of modern grenadine, and they supplied nearly all the sweetness in the glass.
- "A fancy glass"Trade usage for a stemmed, footed glass as distinct from the plain soda tumbler. The nutmeg is optional in the text, added over the top at serving.
Hasty pudding was an old name for a quick boiled porridge — flour or oatmeal in milk in England, cornmeal in water or milk in New England — quick because it needed no oven and no yeast. The soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s borrowed dessert and food names freely for drinks that had nothing to do with them; the point of the name was familiarity, not fidelity. What this formula shows is how far the fountain relied on the raw egg: shaken with ice it gave body and a thick foam that no syrup could produce on its own, and egg drinks filled whole sections of fountain manuals, sometimes sold as tonics for the thin or the convalescent. Pasteurisation of milk and cream spread through American cities in the following decades, and the raw-egg fountain drink faded with the fountain itself.