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Hot Locomotive
A large bar glass, I yolk of egg, 1½ tablespoonful sugar and I pony honey, mixed well together; 1½ pony curacoa, ½ wineglass Burgundy or claret; mix all thoroughly together; place thin slice of lemon on top with a sprinkle of cinnamon and serve.
A nineteenth-century bar drink written in fountain shorthand: the measures are all in pre-Prohibition glassware, and the one word that matters most, hot, appears only in the title.
- The measuresA pony is 1 fl oz, a wineglass 2 fl oz. So this is 1 oz honey, 1½ oz curaçao and 1 oz Burgundy or claret, with a yolk and about 1½ teaspoons sugar. The finished drink is roughly 4 oz - one serving.
- "Large bar glass"In period usage this is generally the mixing vessel rather than a stated serving size - a heavy tumbler in which the drink was built and stirred. Whether it was drunk from that glass or poured off into a smaller one is not specified here.
- The missing stepNothing in the text says to apply heat, yet the drink is called Hot Locomotive. Other period versions of the drink are served hot - at the bar or the fountain often heated by steam - so the sense is presumably that hot wine goes into the mixed yolk, sugar, honey and curaçao with hard stirring. Without that the drink is a cold, cloying flip.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. A yolk sets at around 150F and the drink will scramble into threads if the wine goes in near boiling or if the mixture is reheated. Warm the wine to about 150-160F, add it in a thin stream while whisking, and serve at once.
- CuraçaoThe nineteenth-century product was a sweetened orange brandy, closer to a modern orange curaçao than to blue curaçao or to dry triple sec. Anything at 30-40% ABV with real bitter-orange peel is right; skip the neon bottlings.
- Burgundy or claretClaret meant red Bordeaux. Either way a dry, moderately tannic red suits it - a Pinot Noir or a Cabernet-Merlot blend does the job. The honey and curaçao supply plenty of sugar, so a jammy modern red will tip it over.
- Raw yolkThe yolk is only partly cooked by the hot wine and never reaches a reliably safe temperature. Use pasteurized eggs, particularly if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised.
- The garnishA thin lemon wheel floated on top with a dusting of ground cinnamon. Grate the cinnamon fresh if you can; pre-ground powder tends to clump on a hot surface rather than perfume it.
The Locomotive belongs to the family of hot spiced wine drinks that circulated in nineteenth-century American mixed-drink manuals alongside mulled wine, negus and the various flips. Its presence in a soda-fountain book is a reminder that the fountain and the bar were not separate trades for long: when temperance sentiment and later Prohibition squeezed the saloon, the drugstore counter inherited a good deal of its equipment, its glassware vocabulary and, as here, its recipe files. Egg-and-honey drinks in particular were sold at the fountain as fortifying rather than merely pleasurable, which is part of how a wine-and-curaçao mixture found a home among the phosphates and the ice cream sodas.