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Jacqueminot
☑ Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Rose Syrup, 2 ounces; Milk, 8 ounces; Egg, white of, 1. Shake well, and add soda water, fine stream only. Serve in a 14-ounce tumbler, and with straws.
A fountain "egg drink" of the type poured across American drugstore counters at the turn of the century. It is built on raw egg white shaken into cold milk and served immediately, which is where the problem lies.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white of one egg is shaken cold into the glass and drunk as-is. Nothing in the procedure brings the egg to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the drink is served over ice, held at exactly the temperature where any contamination is preserved. Anyone wanting a modern egg-white drink should follow a current recipe using pasteurised whites.
- Milk, unheated and unspecifiedMilk, unheated -- Eight ounces of milk go in cold and are never heated, and pasteurisation was not universal in American cities until well into the twentieth century. The recipe assumes an ingredient with a different safety profile from what it implies today.
- Rose syrupA fountain staple made from rose essence or rose water with heavy sugar syrup, not a fruit syrup. Commercial versions may have been coloured with dyes no longer permitted in food. Middle Eastern and South Asian grocers still sell drinkable rose syrup, which is the nearest surviving equivalent.
- "Shaved ice, ½ tumblerful"If the tumbler meant is the 14-ounce serving glass named at the end, that would be roughly 7 ounces by volume of shaved ice, a little under a cup loosely packed; the recipe does not in fact say which glass to measure in. Shaved rather than cubed matters: it chills and dilutes fast under the shaker.
- "Fine stream only"The soda fountain had two draws, a coarse stream and a fine one. Egg and milk drinks took the fine stream because a coarse jet would blow the foam apart and curdle the surface. It is the one piece of technique in the recipe.
- YieldOne 14-ounce glass. The measured liquids come to ten ounces, with the shaved ice and the soda making up the rest.
The drink is named for the Général Jacqueminot rose, a crimson hybrid perpetual introduced in France in 1853 and so ubiquitous in American gardens and florists' windows by the 1890s that "Jack rose" became shorthand for it. The Jack Rose cocktail is often traced to the same rose, though it is only one of several competing explanations. Naming a rose-syrup drink after it was straightforward fountain marketing: the soda counter borrowed its vocabulary from perfumery and the flower trade as freely as from the kitchen. Egg drinks like this one belong to the period when the American drugstore fountain still traded partly on health claims, selling milk-and-egg shakes as nourishment for the run-down alongside phosphates and tonics; the egg was the point, not the garnish.