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Hot Egg Lime Juice Fizz
White of 1 egg, 1 ounce lime juice, 2 teaspoonfuls powdered sugar. Add hot soda and top off with a small spoonful of whipped cream.
A hot soda-fountain drink from the era when fountains ran an urn of hot water alongside the carbonated draught. The obstacle is the egg white, which in this construction is never brought to a safe temperature.
- The raw egg whiteHot soda water leaving a fountain urn is well under a temperature that would pasteurize anything, and it is diluted the instant it hits the glass and the cold juice, sugar and acid. The white is served essentially raw, which carries a Salmonella risk that was not understood when this book was printed. If you want a hot egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg white or shell eggs labeled pasteurized.
- The whipped cream tooThe garnish adds a second uncooked animal product to a merely warm glass. Use pasteurized cream, and note that warming does nothing to make the drink safer.
- "Hot soda"Not carbonated water heated. Fountains kept a separate urn of plain hot water, drawn through a spigot, because carbonation is driven off by heat. Any modern reading of this recipe as "hot seltzer" misunderstands the equipment.
- One ounce of lime juiceFountain books of the period drew on both fresh juice and bottled sweetened lime cordial, and the recipe does not say which is meant. An ounce of fresh lime with only two teaspoons of sugar would be startlingly sharp.
- Powdered sugarNot cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in the modern sense but finely ground white sugar, which dissolves faster than granulated.
- YieldOne glass, and a small one; hot fountain drinks were generally served in a mug or small footed glass rather than a full tumbler.
American soda fountains were a year-round business, and in the cold months they leaned on hot drinks poured from an urn beside the carbonated draught arm: hot chocolate, beef tea, hot lemonade, and egg drinks of exactly this kind. The egg was there for substance as much as texture, part of a long tradition of egg flips, egg nogs and "egg phosphates" sold as restorative rather than merely refreshing, and the fountain sat close enough to the drugstore prescription counter that the line between a treat and a tonic was deliberately blurred. Lime juice in such books usually arrived as a bottled sweetened cordial, a product whose commercial life is generally traced to the nineteenth-century British naval and merchant trade in preserved citrus, and which reached the American fountain as one more syrup in the rack. The whipped cream on top is pure fountain showmanship: the visible flourish that justified the price of the glass.