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Hot Cherry Egg Bounce
One egg, 2 ounces cherry juice, 1 spoonful powdered sugar. Mix thoroughly and mix again while adding hot soda. Add several cherries and a slice of orange. Serve nutmeg.
This is a hot fountain drink built on a whole raw egg, and the heat source is the one thing it cannot supply. The notes below explain the fountain vocabulary and why the drink does not translate.
- The egg is never cookedHot soda water from a fountain was served hot but not boiling, and here it meets a cold glass, cold cherry juice and a cold egg. Nothing in the method holds the egg anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is killed, and the egg is deliberately kept fluid rather than set. A modern recipe for a cooked custard-style hot drink should be used instead.
- "Hot soda" was a fixture, not a mistakeWinter fountain trade ran on hot soda: essentially plain hot water drawn from a separate urn or hot-water tap. It was served hot rather than boiling.
- Cherry juice meant fountain syrupCherry juice meant a fountain product -- The two ounces called for came from the fountain rail and were most likely a sweetened cherry syrup or cordial rather than the unsweetened juice sold today.
- "Spoonful" at the fountainDispensers worked with a standard fountain spoon, closer to a modern teaspoon than a tablespoon. Powdered sugar meant finely ground sugar, which dissolved without grit.
- "Serve nutmeg"Fountain shorthand for grating nutmeg over the top as the glass leaves the counter, the same finishing gesture given to eggnog and milk punch.
- PortionOne serving, roughly eight to ten ounces once the hot water is run in.
"Bounce" is often said to come from cherry bounce, the old cherry-and-brandy cordial that colonial and nineteenth-century households put up by the jar; the fountain name for cherry-flavoured drinks is plausibly a borrowing from it, though the link is a surmise rather than an established one. Fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely printed a hot department alongside the cold, because a druggist who could sell hot soda, hot beef tea and hot egg drinks in January kept his counter earning through the months when nobody wanted ice cream. Egg drinks in particular carried a whiff of the tonic: the raw egg beaten into syrup was sold as nourishment as much as refreshment, a temperance cousin of the tavern flip, and the grated nutmeg on top is generally traced to that older family of egg-and-spirit drinks.