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Hot Egg Checkerberry
Take either 1 ounce wintergreen syrup or wintergreen and orange syrups, and half; 1 egg, ½ half and half 1 egg, ½ ounce cream, and hot water enough to fill an 8-ounce ounce cream, and hot water enough to fill an 8-ounce glass. Mix the syrup, egg and cream together in an egg shaker, shake as in making cold egg drinks, add the hot water, and mix all by pouring back and forth several times from shaker to mug. Or, prepare by beating the egg with a spoon, add the syrup and cream, mix all quickly with the spoon and add hot water , stirring constantly, and strain.
A soda-fountain hot egg drink from the era when the fountain sold warm beverages through the winter. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the drink itself should not be made by this method.
- Why not as writtenThe whole egg is only warmed by hot water poured into a shaker and tipped back and forth. Nothing in the procedure brings the egg to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the dilution with cold syrup and cream drops the mixture well below that point almost immediately. If you want a hot egg drink, use a current recipe built around a cooked or pasteurized custard base.
- CheckerberryCheckerberry is Gaultheria procumbens, the eastern teaberry or wintergreen. At the fountain the name was simply a synonym for wintergreen flavour, which is why the recipe calls for wintergreen syrup.
- Wintergreen syrupFountain syrups were generally heavy sugar syrups, often given in period manuals as something like two parts sugar to one part water, flavoured with an extract or oil. Commercial wintergreen syrup is now uncommon; what is sold as wintergreen flavouring is usually synthetic methyl salicylate rather than distilled oil of the leaf.
- Ounces here mean fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is two tablespoons; half an ounce of cream is one tablespoon. The "8-ounce glass" is a one-cup fountain glass, so a single serving.
- Half and halfHere the phrase appears to mean half of each syrup, not the dairy product: one ounce total, split between wintergreen and orange.
- Egg shaker and mugThe egg shaker was a two-piece metal tumbler kept at the fountain for egg drinks; the mug is simply a cup. Pouring back and forth between the two blends and aerates the drink.
- YieldOne 8-ounce serving.
Soda fountains in the United States tried to trade through the winter as well as the summer, and turn-of-the-century trade manuals gave space to hot drinks meant to keep the marble counter busy in January: hot lemonade, hot beef tea, hot malted milk, and egg drinks like this one. Wintergreen, sold under the older regional name checkerberry, was a native flavour long before it was a fountain syrup; the leaves of Gaultheria procumbens were steeped for tea and the oil distilled for liniment and confectionery. Egg drinks occupied a middle ground between refreshment and medicine, and dispensers' guides sometimes recommended them to customers thought to need building up.