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Over the Waves
Lemon syrup, 1½ ounces; grape juice, 1 ounce; white of 1 egg; acid phosphate solution, ½ teaspoonful; cracked ice, ¼ glass. Shake, egg; strain, toss and serve. , ½ teaspoonful; cracked ice, 4 glass. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain "egg drink" of the sort mixed to order in American drugstores, printed here with the run-on typesetting errors common to fountain manuals. The raw egg white is the reason it cannot be recommended as written.
- Why the cautionThe white of one egg is shaken cold and served immediately; nothing in the drink is ever heated. Raw shell egg carries a risk of Salmonella, and the acid phosphate and citric acid in the syrup do not pasteurize it. If you want a fountain egg drink, use a current recipe written around pasteurized egg product.
- The garbled textThe entry as set contains a duplicated tail: "Shake, egg; strain, toss and serve" followed by a second fragment repeating the phosphate and ice. Read it as a single instruction, and read "4 glass" as the same quarter glass given earlier.
- Lemon syrup, "½ ounces"Half an ounce against a full ounce of grape juice is lean for a flavoring syrup, and the plural "ounces" may indicate a dropped figure. The quantity is genuinely ambiguous in the original.
- Acid phosphate solutionA dilute solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold to soda fountains as a sour agent with a rounder, less fruity bite than citric acid. It is made again by small producers; it is not the same thing as lemon juice, though lemon juice is a common substitute.
- "Toss"Fountain shorthand for pouring the drink back and forth between two glasses or shaker tins to build foam after straining. It is a finishing step, not a mixing one.
- Glass sizeA quarter glass of cracked ice means a quarter of the fountain glass, whose capacity is not stated here. The finished drink is a single serving; the text as printed gives no instruction to add plain or carbonated water.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through Prohibition, when the drugstore counter took over much of the social ground the saloon had occupied. The whole or separated egg was valued less for flavor than for body and foam: shaken hard with cracked ice, a white turns a thin syrup-and-juice mixture into something with a creamy head that survives the walk to the table. The name Over the Waves is often assumed, as many fountain drink names were, to echo a popular tune of the day: Juventino Rosas's waltz Sobre las Olas, published in Mexico in the 1880s and widely played in the United States around the turn of the century, though nothing directly connects the drink to the song. Fountain manuals of the era routinely named drinks after songs, actresses and colleges, and dispensers were expected to invent their own variations on the basic formula of syrup, acid phosphate, egg and ice.