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Hot Egg Milk
Two teaspoonfuls sugar, 1 ounce cream, i egg, hot milk to fill an 8-ounce mug. Prepare like hot egg checkerberry, top with whipped cream and sprinkle with nutmeg. If there is no facility for keeping hot milk, use about 2 ounces of cream, and fill the mug with hot water.
A soda-fountain winter drink from the era when the pharmacy counter sold hot beverages alongside cold. The mechanics are simple; the food safety is not, and the egg is the reason.
- The egg is never cookedA whole egg goes into the mug with sugar and cream (the method is borrowed from the cross-referenced hot egg checkerberry) and hot milk is poured over it. Nothing in the recipe guarantees the egg reaches a pasteurising temperature: hot milk poured over cold cream and egg in an open mug will not reliably hold the mixture in the range where Salmonella is killed. Use a current recipe if you want a hot egg drink.
- "Hot egg checkerberry"The cross-referenced recipe uses checkerberry syrup, from Gaultheria procumbens, the eastern teaberry or wintergreen. The characteristic flavour compound is methyl salicylate, which is also why wintergreen oil is a poison in bulk quantities.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesAn 8-ounce mug is a cup; 1 ounce of cream is 2 tablespoons, 2 ounces is a quarter cup.
- Cream then and nowFountain cream was probably nearer modern light cream than to today's heavy whipping cream, which runs 36 percent butterfat and up; the exact butterfat is not recorded here, and the recipe also assumes cream that will whip for the topping.
- YieldOne 8-ounce mug, one serving.
Hot drinks were the American soda fountain's answer to the dead months. A counter that lived on carbonated water and ice cream from May to September needed winter trade, and fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry sections of hot chocolate, beef tea, malted milk, hot lemonade and egg drinks, served in mugs rather than glasses. Egg drinks in particular sat on the border between refreshment and medicine, which suited the drugstore fountain: a raw egg beaten into hot milk was a familiar domestic restorative for the run-down and the convalescent, and the fountain dressed it up with whipped cream and grated nutmeg. Checkerberry, the flavour this recipe defers to, was a characteristically American fountain note -- wintergreen from the northeastern woods, and commonly supplied as a manufactured syrup.