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Hot Egg-Nog (One egg dash whisky dash)
One egg, 1 dash whisky, 1 dash sherry, 1 teaspoonful sugar, I pinch cinnamon. Break fresh egg into shaker. Shake well and pour into 5-ounce bouillon cup. Add dashes of whisky and sherry and 1 teaspoonful of sugar. Sprinkle a little cinnamon on it.
This is a fountain man's shorthand rather than a full recipe, and the gap it leaves is the dangerous one: the egg is never cooked.
- The egg is never heatedThe whole raw egg is broken into the shaker, shaken, and poured into the cup. Nothing in the written procedure brings it anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the "hot" of the title comes from a step the book never states. A current recipe using pasteurised eggs or a cooked custard base should be used instead.
- The missing hot liquidA 5-ounce bouillon cup filled with one shaken egg and a few dashes of spirits would be well short of half full. Some hot liquid must have been intended to finish it -- milk or water -- but the printed text names none, and the recipe is incomplete as it stands.
- A dash is not a measurement hereAt the fountain a dash meant whatever came out of a bar bottle in one tip; period sources differ on the amount and it plainly varied by house and by hand. The whisky and sherry here are seasoning, not a serious pour, and no accurate conversion can be given.
- The bouillon cupA 5-ounce bouillon cup is a small two-handled china cup rather than a mug, the shape associated with clear soup. Its use here indicates a cup meant to be drunk from, and fixes the intended serving size at 5 ounces.
- Sugar added lastThe teaspoonful of sugar goes in after the egg has already been poured, so it is unlikely to dissolve properly. Sugar syrup was in use at fountains and would have suited the sequence better, but the recipe as printed calls for dry sugar.
Hot egg drinks were a winter staple of the American soda fountain, which in the years before Prohibition was as much a general drinks counter as a place for ice cream: the same marble bar sold phosphates, egg creams and hot beef bouillon, and where alcohol appeared at all it was normally dispensed on a medicinal footing, varying by jurisdiction. The egg-nog in a bouillon cup sits precisely at that intersection, borrowing the tableware of the soup course to sell a drink that is half medicinal restorative and half cocktail. Egg-nog itself is generally traced to the English posset, a hot mixture of milk, eggs and fortified wine; the sherry in this version may well echo that older sack-based drink, while the whisky is the American addition. Fountain manuals of the period were written for a clerk working at speed behind a counter, which is why so much is left unsaid here: the hot draw, the strength of a dash, the finishing of the cup were all assumed knowledge of the trade.