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Hot Egg-Nog (Break fresh egg into shaker)
1. 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 before drawing hot milk. Serve with 2 five o'clock tea cakes. 2. Three-fourths ounce plain syrup, ½ ounce brandy, 3 drops angostura bitters, 1 egg. Put in shaker and beat well. Strain in 10-ounce mug and fill with hot milk; finish with whipped cream and nutmeg.
A soda-fountain drink built in the shaker and finished from the hot-milk tap. The mechanics are easy to read, but the egg handling belongs to a period before anyone tracked Salmonella in shell eggs.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole egg is beaten and then merely diluted with hot milk drawn from a fountain tap. Milk held in a fountain urn sits below any temperature that would pasteurize the egg, and pouring it over the other ingredients in the cup drops it further; the egg is effectively served raw. Shell eggs are a recognized vehicle for Salmonella enteritidis, and there is no step here that addresses it. Use a current eggnog recipe built on pasteurized egg or a cooked custard base.
- Alcohol is not a safeguardA few dashes of whisky and sherry, or half an ounce of brandy in a ten-ounce mug, gives a final drink of very low alcohol by volume. That does nothing meaningful to bacteria in the egg.
- "Drawing hot milk"Fountains carried a hot-milk spigot fed from a steam-heated urn, held hot but well short of boiling. The instruction assumes that equipment; there is no home equivalent implied in the text.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain" or "simple" syrup of the era was generally heavier than the 1:1 syrup most bars keep now, so three-quarters of an ounce carries more sugar than the same volume of modern syrup would; formulas varied.
- Measures and vesselsA bouillon cup at the fountain was a squat two-handled cup, here specified at 5 ounces; the second version uses a 10-ounce mug, which is a much longer, milkier drink. A "dash" from a fountain bottle was never a precise measure.
- Five o'clock tea cakesSmall plain sponge or butter cakes of the sort served with afternoon tea. Any small plain teacake or ladyfinger occupies the same place on the saucer.
American soda fountains sold far more than carbonated drinks: the marble counter was also a hot-beverage station, with clam bouillon, hot chocolate, malted milk and egg drinks drawn from steam-heated urns to keep the trade going through winter. Hot egg-nog sat at the point where the fountain overlapped with the sickroom, since beaten egg in hot milk was a standard convalescent food throughout the nineteenth century and a splash of spirits was considered part of the medicine rather than a cocktail. Formulas like these, with brandy or whisky listed as an ordinary fountain ingredient, come from the period when a dispenser could keep bottled spirits behind the counter as flavoring and tonic.