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Life Preserver
Mixing glass half full of cracked ice, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, about 3 teaspoonfuls good rye whisky, 1 egg, 2 ounces plain cream. Shake, add soda from both streams and strain into 12-ounce glass.
A fountain "egg drink" of the pre-Prohibition sort: whisky, pineapple syrup, cream and a whole raw egg shaken and lengthened with carbonated water. The mechanics are easy to read across to a modern bar; the raw egg is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe egg is never heated at any stage, and it is shaken into cream that will also stay cold and raw. Shell eggs in the era of this book were assumed clean if unbroken; Salmonella Enteritidis inside intact eggs was not understood, and a drink like this gives it a cold, protein-rich medium and no kill step. If you want a modern egg-and-cream fountain drink, use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- "Soda from both streams"A fountain draft arm delivered carbonated water in more than one form, commonly a coarse, forceful stream and a fine stream. The phrase is usually read as agitating the mix with the coarse stream and finishing with the fine. The nearest home equivalent is a soda siphon.
- The measuresOunces here are fluid ounces: 1 oz syrup is 2 tablespoons, 2 oz cream is a quarter cup, and 3 teaspoons of rye is half a fluid ounce — a token pour, not a cocktail's worth. The 12-ounce glass is roughly 355 ml.
- Pineapple syrupA sweetened fountain syrup rather than canned juice, generally fruit juice combined with sugar syrup. Substituting plain juice would leave the drink thinner and less sweet.
- "Plain cream"Fountain shorthand for unwhipped, unsweetened cream, generally around 18–20 percent fat — closer to today's light cream or half-and-half than to heavy whipping cream.
- Cracked iceCracked ice was the usual shaking ice at the fountain; small irregular pieces chill and dilute quickly, and the mixture is then strained off the ice entirely.
- YieldOne 12-ounce serving.
American soda fountains and American bars overlapped far more than the temperance rhetoric of the period suggests, and fountain manuals routinely carried a handful of formulas with a spoonful of whisky, brandy or sherry in them — dispensed, at least nominally, as restoratives rather than refreshment. The name is of a piece with that: "Life Preserver," like "Pick-Me-Up" and the raw-egg prairie oyster, belongs to a family of morning-after drinks that traded on the long-standing belief that a whole egg beaten into something cold and strong settled the stomach. Whole-egg fountain drinks were common enough to have their own technique, the egg shaken hard with cracked ice to emulsify it into the cream before carbonation went in. Prohibition ended the whisky end of the trade after 1920, and the eggs faded later, as fountains gave way to packaged soft drinks.