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Manhattan Cream
Three-fourths ounce pineapple syrup, ¾ ounce vanilla syrup, 2 ounces ice cream, ¼ glass cracked ice, 1 egg. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A shaken fountain drink from the era when the soda clerk kept a bowl of shell eggs beside the syrup rail. The measures are straightforward once you know the fountain's vocabulary, but the whole raw egg is the reason this one belongs on the page rather than in the glass.
- Why not as writtenThe egg is broken into the shaker raw and never heated at any point. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, not merely on the shell, and shaking with ice brings the mixture nowhere near a temperature that would control it. If you want a drink of this style, work from a current recipe written with that hazard in mind.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesFountain syrups were drawn by the ounce from pumps or ladles: ¾ ounce is a tablespoon and a half. The 2 ounces of ice cream appears to be a volume measure as well, roughly a quarter cup, which is a small scoop rather than a dessert portion.
- A "glass" is a unitFountain formulas measure ice and liquid in fractions of the service glass, commonly an 8 to 12 ounce soda glass. A quarter glass of cracked ice is therefore roughly a third of a cup, enough to chill and aerate in the shaker.
- Cracked, not cubedCracked ice was chipped from a block into irregular pieces smaller than a modern cube. It chills faster and dilutes more, which is part of why these drinks were shaken hard and served immediately.
- "Toss" is fountain shorthandIt is generally understood to mean pouring the drink between two vessels after straining, to raise the foam: a finishing step for texture, not an ingredient direction.
- The syrupsVanilla and pineapple fountain syrups were heavy sugar syrups, far sweeter and thicker than the flavoring extracts sold under similar names now. Substituting extract for syrup would leave the drink thin and harsh.
- YieldOne glass, served at once. Nothing in this formula holds; the foam collapses within a minute or two.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried hundreds of formulas like this, many of them named after cities, hotels, colleges or fashionable resorts, with no closer connection to the place than the name on the menu card "Manhattan" here signals metropolitan smartness rather than any borough tradition. Egg drinks were a fountain staple in that period, and the trade literature commonly promoted them as nourishing and suited to invalids and to men who wanted something restorative without visiting a saloon; the egg phosphate and egg lemonade belong to the same family, and the shaker was as much a fixture of the drugstore counter as of the bar. What the formula really records is a trade practice: fountain work was built on a rack of standardized syrups, a scoop of ice cream and a set of measures reckoned in ounces and fractions of a glass, so that any clerk could reproduce a named drink from a printed line of shorthand.