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Marshmallow Delight
One-half ounce almond syrup, 1 ounce raspberry syrup, 1 egg, milk to fill glass, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain shake from the era when a whole raw egg was standard equipment behind the counter. The mixing is trivial; the egg is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe egg is broken into cold milk and ice, shaken, strained and served. Nothing in the drink ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell egg. That risk was accepted then and is not now. If you want an egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg product.
- Milk was not what it is nowMilk supplies of the fountain era varied by place; raw milk was still sold in many markets, though pasteurization was becoming common. Retail milk today is pasteurized and is not the hazard here; the shell egg is.
- Almond syrupFountain almond syrup is orgeat: an emulsion of sweet almonds, sugar and usually orange-flower water. It is still sold for cocktails. Period formulas sometimes leaned on bitter almond or benzaldehyde for punch, which is another reason to treat a century-old fountain book as reading rather than instruction.
- The syrups are fluid ouncesHalf an ounce of almond and one ounce of raspberry are liquid measures of the kind a fountain syrup pump delivered; pumps were often calibrated at about an ounce a stroke, though sizes varied.
- "Toss"Not a garnish step. Tossing meant pouring the drink from one mixing glass to another, held apart, to aerate it and build a head of foam before it went to the customer. The egg white is what makes that foam hold.
- Glass sizeA fountain glass of the period ran roughly 10 to 12 ounces, so "¼ glass ice" is around 3 ounces of cracked ice and "milk to fill," after the syrups and the egg, is something under a cup. One drink.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure — the egg phosphate, the egg lemonade and the egg malted were pitched to clerks and shoppers as a light meal taken standing up, a habit inherited from the older tavern flip and eggnog. The name here is pure fountain marketing: there is no marshmallow in the glass, only the pale, foamy, faintly almond-scented body that tossing an egg-white drink produces, which the dispenser was expected to sell on looks. Fountain manuals of this kind were trade books, written for the soda clerk rather than the household, which is why the instructions assume a syrup pump, a shaker, a strainer and a man who already knows how far apart to hold the glasses.