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Orange Spray
One egg; orange syrup, 1 ounce; orange bitters, 2 dashes; sweet cream, 1 ounce Glass ½ full ice; shake and use fine stream soda. Top off with nutmeg.
A fountain egg drink of the shaken type, built in the glass and finished with soda from the fine stream. The measures and equipment are easy enough to read across; the egg is the problem.
- The raw eggThe whole egg goes into the shaker and is never heated at any stage — the drink is finished with cold carbonated water and served immediately. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk as well as on the shell, and nothing in this procedure reduces it. Anyone wanting an egg-based fountain drink today should follow a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesFountain syrup and cream were drawn by the ounce, so 1 ounce is 2 tablespoons.
- Orange syrupNot orange juice. Fountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with orange — oil, peel extract or juice, depending on the formula — roughly the consistency of modern snow-cone or Italian soda syrup, and far sweeter than juice.
- Orange bittersA bar bitters made from dried bitter-orange peel, and still commercially available. Two dashes is a small fraction of a teaspoon — the drink's only bitter note against an ounce of syrup and an ounce of cream.
- "Fine stream"Fountain taps offered a coarse stream for agitating and a fine stream for filling gently without breaking the foam. In practice it means drawing soda water slowly down the side of the glass rather than blasting it in.
- "Glass ½ full ice"Probably shaved or cracked ice rather than cubes. The ice goes in with everything but the soda.
- NutmegGrated fresh over the finished foam, a common finish for egg drinks at the fountain.
The soda fountain's egg drinks — egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg creams in the older literal sense — sat somewhere between refreshment and tonic, and were sold as such. A raw egg shaken into a cold sweet drink was widely regarded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as nourishment for the thin, the convalescent and the working man with no time for lunch, and druggists who ran fountains as an adjunct to the prescription counter were happy to encourage the idea. Formularies like this one gave dispensers hundreds of variations on the same handful of components: syrup, cream, egg, bitters, carbonated water, a grating of nutmeg. The orange bitters here is the giveaway that fountain work and bartending shared a vocabulary; the same bottle stood behind both counters, and after national Prohibition took effect on 17 January 1920 a good many bartenders found themselves working the fountain instead.