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Mary's Delight
One egg, pineapple syrup, strawberry syrup, acid phosphate, 1 dash; angostura bitters, 1 dash; sweet cream, ½ ounce. Fill glass with ice, shake, strain and add fine stream soda, then pour from glass to shaker, tip with nutmeg, serve with straws.
A fountain egg drink written in the shorthand of a working dispenser, who knew his own syrup measures and his own glass. The quantities left blank are the ones you have to decide.
- The unmeasured syrupsPineapple and strawberry syrup are given without amounts because the fountain man worked by pump stroke — commonly about an ounce a pull. Taken together that puts the syrup somewhere between 1½ and 2 ounces; more than that and the egg reads as candy.
- Acid phosphateA solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold by the gallon to soda fountains across the country. It gives a dry, mineral tartness that no citrus juice imitates. It is made again today by a few small producers; a dash is usually taken as about ¼ teaspoon.
- Use a pasteurized eggThe whole egg goes in raw and is never heated. Buy in-shell pasteurized eggs, or skip the drink. Shell eggs of unknown handling are the one genuine risk in the glass.
- "Fine stream soda"The old draft arms had coarse and fine streams; fine was a narrow, high-pressure jet used to cut and lift a drink. A soda siphon or a firmly squeezed bottle of cold seltzer poured from height down the side of the glass is the nearest thing.
- Pour from glass to shaker, and backPour from glass to shaker -- This is the hinge. After the soda goes in, the drink is poured once into the shaker — presumably to come back to the glass, though the text does not say so — to build the foam without knocking the carbonation flat. Do not shake it again after the soda; you will lose the head and the fizz both.
- Shaking the eggThe first shake, before any soda, wants to be hard and short — fifteen to twenty seconds with plenty of ice — to emulsify the yolk with the cream. Strain out the ice; the drink is served cold but not on the rocks.
- Sweet creamPeriod "sweet cream" means fresh, unsoured cream, not sweetened. Half an ounce of heavy cream is right; it is there for body, not richness.
- Nutmeg and yield"Tip with nutmeg" means a light grating over the foam, freshly grated rather than tinned. The recipe makes one tall drink, and should be drunk at once through the straws before the foam collapses.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through Prohibition, sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure — a whole egg, cream and sugar in a glass was pitched to clerks and shopgirls as a lunch. Acid phosphate, the sour note here, was a druggist's product: fountains grew out of pharmacies, and the dispenser was often the same man who compounded prescriptions, which is why his recipes read like formulas and why bitters and mineral acids sat on the counter beside the fruit syrups. Fancy named combinations like this one were the fountain's stock in trade, invented locally and traded through trade journals and books of this kind; the woman behind the name, if there was one, is unrecorded. The style largely died with the drugstore fountain, and acid phosphate vanished from general sale for decades before cocktail bartenders revived it in the 2000s.