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Orgeat and Egg
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Orgeat Syrup, 2 ounces; Egg, 1. Shake well; strain through a julep strainer into a 10-ounce tumbler; fill tumbler with soda water, using fine stream, and serve with straws.
A fountain-style egg drink from the era when the drugstore soda counter sold "nourishing" beverages alongside phosphates and ice cream sodas. The mechanics are straightforward; the raw egg is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe whole egg goes into the shaker raw and is never heated at any point — it is shaken with ice, strained, and topped with cold carbonated water. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis inside the intact egg, and nothing in this procedure reduces it. Chilling and carbonation do nothing to the organism.
- Not a cooked-custard caseUnlike a boiled custard or a baked cake batter, there is no later cooking step to fall back on. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe written around the egg-safety question rather than adapting this one.
- Orgeat, then and nowOrgeat is an almond syrup — the name comes from barley, which was the original base. Period orgeat was frequently built on bitter almond or benzaldehyde flavouring, which is not the same product as the sweet-almond orgeat sold for tiki drinks today.
- "½ tumblerful" of shaved iceThe recipe names a 10-ounce tumbler only as the serving glass, so the size of the vessel being half-filled with ice is not given here; if it were also a 10-ounce glass, that would be roughly 5 ounces by volume. Shaved rather than cubed ice was usual at the fountain, chilling and diluting quickly in a hand shaker.
- Julep strainerThe perforated bowl-shaped strainer that sits in the mouth of the glass, not a fine mesh. It holds back ice and shell fragments while letting the drink through; a modern Hawthorne strainer does the same job here.
- "Fine stream"Fountain apparatus had separate coarse and fine draws. The fine stream was used on anything with egg or cream so the carbonation went in gently instead of blowing foam over the rim — the equivalent of pouring soda water slowly down the side of the glass.
- YieldOne 10-ounce drink. Two ounces of syrup in a glass that size is sweet by current standards; fountain manuals of the period often give something nearer 1 to 1½ ounces of syrup per 8 ounces of soda.
Orgeat reached English kitchens from France, where orgeat derives from orge, barley — the earliest versions were barley waters, with almonds coming to dominate the formula and eventually to replace the grain entirely. By the time American soda fountains were at their height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, orgeat was one of the standard bottled syrups a dispenser kept on the rail, alongside vanilla, sarsaparilla and lemon. The egg drinks in fountain manuals of this kind belong to the counter's other identity: the soda fountain grew out of the pharmacy, and a shaken egg beverage was sold as much for strength and convalescence as for pleasure, a soft-drink cousin of the tavern flip and the egg nog. Recipes like this one faded from fountain practice for a number of reasons; changing attitudes to raw-egg service in public food handling were among them.