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Hot Egg Ginger
Prepare same as hot egg checkerberry, substituting ginger syrup for the other syrup.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: the fountain man was expected to turn back a page to the hot egg checkerberry and swap the flavoring. A few notes on what the terms mean, and on why the drink itself is a problem now.
- Why the cautionFountain hot egg drinks of this type were generally built by beating a whole raw egg with syrup and letting the mixture down with hot water or hot soda while stirring; the base formula is not reprinted here, so its exact method cannot be checked. On that pattern the egg is only warmed and thinned, not held at a temperature that would reliably destroy Salmonella, and no cooking step follows. If you want a hot egg drink, use a current recipe written around a custard base or pasteurized eggs.
- CheckerberryThe American name for Gaultheria procumbens, eastern teaberry or wintergreen. Checkerberry syrup was a standard fountain flavor, tasting of methyl salicylate — closer to root beer and wintergreen candy than to anything fruity. Here it is simply the drink being copied, not an ingredient.
- Ginger syrupFountain ginger syrup was a sugar syrup carrying a ginger extract or tincture. It is not ginger ale syrup and not candied-ginger sauce.
- "Hot" at the fountainFountain hot water was typically drawn from an urn or the hot-water faucet of the apparatus; this recipe specifies nothing about it. Whatever the temperature, nothing here brings the egg to a cooked state.
Soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did a brisk winter trade, and the hot side of the counter was as codified as the cold: hot lemonade, hot beef tea, hot malted milk, and a family of hot egg drinks flavored with whatever syrup the customer named. Egg drinks sat on the border between refreshment and medicine, sold as strengthening for the run-down and the convalescent at a time when the drugstore fountain was still physically attached to the pharmacy; ginger, long used as a warming carminative, was an obvious partner. The recipe's telegraphic form is typical of trade manuals like this one, which assumed a dispenser working at speed and saw no reason to repeat a method given elsewhere in the book.