Home › At the Fountain › Maringo Flip
Maringo Flip
Mix in glass 1 egg, equal parts of vanilla and pineapple syrup to make 1½ ounces, dash of ice cream, a little cracked ice. Shake well. Have ready a large bell glass with ½ ounce of crushed strawberry. Now turn this into the large glass, fill with fine stream, top with nutmeg and serve with straw.
A fountain flip of the shaken-egg school, and that is precisely where it fails now: the whole egg goes into the glass raw and nothing in the procedure ever heats it.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedThe egg is shaken with ice, syrup and cold soda water and served immediately. Salmonella on or in an intact shell egg is killed by heat, not by acid syrup or cold, and a shaken drink distributes any contamination through the entire glass. Nothing in this recipe brings the egg near a safe temperature.
- Why fountain practice made it worseThe drink was mixed and served on the spot, with no step that would reduce contamination from the shell. Modern pasteurised eggs exist, but reproducing this drink is a matter for a current recipe written with them in mind rather than for this text.
- Fountain vocabularyA "flip" at the fountain meant an egg drink shaken with syrup and finished with soda; the name carried over from the older hot ale-and-egg flip of tavern days, though the fountain version is cold and unrelated in method. "Fine stream" is the fountain's fine spout, used to fill without foaming the drink over the rim.
- Bell glassThe large bell glass is the wide-mouthed, flared fountain tumbler, chosen so that the shaken mixture and the soda together have room to build a head.
- On the measurementsThe printed page gives equal parts vanilla and pineapple syrup to make 1½ ounces, as our text now reads. "Dash of ice cream" means a small spoonful rather than a liquid dash.
- NutmegFresh-grated nutmeg over the foam was a common finish on fountain egg drinks.
American soda fountains sold egg drinks in enormous numbers between roughly the 1880s and the 1930s, marketed less as sweets than as tonics for the run-down clerk or the invalid on a light diet, an idea inherited from the medicinal origins of the drugstore fountain itself. Books like this one were trade manuals for the dispenser behind the marble counter, printed in terse shorthand for someone who already knew what a bell glass and a fine stream were. The name "Maringo" is unexplained in the text and appears to be one of the hundreds of invented or misspelled fountain names of the period, quite possibly a garbling of Marengo, which had been attached to dishes and drinks since Napoleon's victory there in 1800.