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Lunarette
One-half ounce grape syrup, ½ ounce vanilla syrup, 2 dashes port wine, 2 tablespoonfuls serve. ice cream, 1 egg, ¼ glass shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and cream, 1 egg, 4 glass shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and If your fountain is small, serve the well-known popular flavors. Do not attempt to introduce new drinks.
A fountain "egg drink" of the pre-Prohibition period, printed here with the typesetting scrambled — but the reason not to make it is the whole egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionThe entire egg goes into the shaker raw and the drink is served cold. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk as well as on the shell, and shaking with ice does nothing to it. If you want a modern egg cream or flip of this type, follow a current recipe written around pasteurized egg.
- The text is garbledThe original page has doubled and dropped type: the sequence beginning '2 tablespoonfuls serve. ice cream, 1 egg, ¼ glass shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and' runs a second time in shortened form as 'cream, 1 egg, 4 glass shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and', with words dropped and the fraction lost. The intended line appears to be two tablespoonfuls of ice cream, one egg, a quarter glass of shaved ice, shaken, strained, tossed and served.
- "Glass" as a measureAt the fountain a glass was most often something in the range of 8 ounces, though sizes varied and this book does not define it; on that assumption a quarter glass of shaved ice is on the order of 2 ounces by volume — a scant handful, not a filled tumbler.
- Dashes of portA dash was whatever came out of a dash-stoppered bottle, a very small quantity, and the book does not define it. Two dashes of port here are for colour and a faint winey top note, not for strength; wine dashes do appear alongside syrups in pre-Prohibition fountain formularies.
- "Toss"Apparently fountain shorthand for pouring the shaken drink between two vessels to raise a head of foam before it goes into the glass, though the book does not explain the term.
- The closing advice"If your fountain is small, serve the well-known popular flavors. Do not attempt to introduce new drinks" is trade counsel to the operator, not part of the formula — a stray line of editorial matter that the compositor ran on.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were written for the dispenser behind the counter rather than the cook at home, and they ran to hundreds of formulas built from the same few dozen syrups, so novelty often had to come from names: Lunarette looks like a coinage on luna with the fashionable -ette ending, though the derivation is a guess and the name carries no fixed meaning. The egg drink was a serious category in that trade, sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure — egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg creams were pressed on invalids and on working men wanting a quick meal at the counter. The two dashes of port are the more telling detail: before national Prohibition, wine dashes were stocked at American fountains and appear openly in formularies of the period.