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Hot Egg Pineapple
Prepare like hot egg checkerberry, substituting pineapple syrup for the other syrup.
This is a cross-reference entry from the hot-drink side of the fountain, and it depends entirely on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book. It also depends on a practice — hot water poured over a raw shell egg — that no longer meets any standard for safe egg handling.
- Why it failsFountain hot-egg drinks generally worked by beating a raw egg with syrup and drawing hot water or hot milk onto it. However the base entry is worded, an egg treated this way is never held at a temperature and time that would inactivate Salmonella. A current recipe should be used for any egg drink.
- It is not a self-contained recipeEverything except the flavour comes from "hot egg checkerberry" elsewhere in the book: the egg, the syrup quantity, the hot draw and the serving vessel. Read that entry first or this line means nothing.
- CheckerberryThe New England name for wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens. Fountain checkerberry syrup was a wintergreen flavour, so the substitution here is simply swapping one fountain syrup for another.
- Pineapple syrupIn fountain practice this was a sweetened flavouring syrup, not the thin bottled juice sold today. Formulations varied; the quantity here is whatever the checkerberry entry specifies.
- The hot tapSoda fountains commonly kept a hot-water urn or steam-heated tap alongside the carbonated draws, which is what made a "hot soda" trade possible. There is no exact domestic equivalent.
- YieldPresumably a single serving; the recipe itself states no yield.
Soda fountains had an obvious problem: their business collapsed in winter. The trade answer, well established by the 1890s, was the "hot soda" menu — hot beef tea, clam bouillon, hot chocolate, hot lemonade, hot ginger, and a run of hot egg drinks flavoured with whatever syrups were already on the counter. The egg was sold as nourishment as much as refreshment; fountain drinks with egg in them sat on the border between a treat and a tonic. Checkerberry, the base recipe here, is wintergreen, a flavour with deep roots in the northeastern United States, where the plant grows wild and was used for tea long before it was bottled as syrup. Pineapple, by contrast, signalled the opposite thing: canned and syruped tropical fruit was cheap and widely available by 1900, and its appearance on a fountain list was a small piece of modernity. The recipe's bare one-line form is typical of these manuals.