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Morocco Punch
One egg, ½ ounces vanilla syrup, 4 dashes brandy, 2 ounces plain cream, 1 teaspoonful malted milk, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve. Top with nutmeg.
This is a fountain egg drink of the flip family: a whole raw egg shaken with cream, syrup and a splash of spirit, poured cold and dusted with nutmeg. It cannot be made safely today, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of technique.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedThe egg goes into the shaker whole and the drink is strained and served cold. Nothing in the procedure brings the egg anywhere near the temperatures used to inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis -- around 160F for an egg mixture, or the lower, longer holds (roughly 140F for three and a half minutes) used to pasteurise liquid egg -- and the organism can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell. There is no cooking step to fall back on, as there would be in a custard or a cake batter.
- The brandy does nothingFour dashes is on the order of a quarter teaspoon in roughly five ounces of liquid. Alcohol at that concentration has no antimicrobial effect on a raw egg; the spirit here is a flavouring, not a safeguard, and it should not be read as one.
- Held cold, then shaken warmHeld cold, then shaken cold -- Some fountain manuals describe breaking eggs in advance into a bowl or crock and dipping from it during service. Where that was done, a standing pool of raw egg at counter temperature, repeatedly opened, is poor handling by any modern standard, though raw shell egg was not identified as a route for salmonellosis until long after these drinks were being sold.
- Cream and malted milkPlain cream in fountain usage meant ordinary sweet dairy cream, and in this period it was not reliably pasteurised. Malted milk is the malted-grain and milk powder still sold today, so that part of the ingredient list translates directly; it is the fresh dairy and the egg that carry the risk.
- What the measures meanAn ounce at the fountain is a fluid ounce, and a glass is the serving tumbler, so a quarter glass of ice is a couple of ounces of shaved or cracked ice used both to chill and to dilute. The 1/2 ounce of vanilla syrup is fountain syrup, far sweeter and thicker than vanilla extract.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg product or a heated, cooled base. Do not adapt the version above.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried whole chapters of egg drinks: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg nogs and flips, all shaken to order in a tin. They sat at the point where the fountain overlapped with the bar and with the druggist's counter, and they were sold as much for nourishment as for pleasure, which is why malted milk turns up here alongside brandy and nutmeg. The name is decorative rather than descriptive. Fountain writers attached exotic geography to formulas fairly freely, and what Morocco was meant to signal here is anyone's guess; it says nothing about North African drinking. Nutmeg has long been the grating of choice for any egg-and-cream drink. The medicinal splash of spirit is characteristic of the period too: a few dashes of brandy in a fountain drink kept one foot in the pharmacy, where the soda counter had begun, and gave the mixture the air of a tonic. Egg drinks faded from fountain menus over the twentieth century, as the fountains themselves disappeared and commercial pasteurised egg products replaced the crock of broken eggs beside the shaker.