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Parfait Amour
Chocolate syrup, 2 ounces; sweet cream, 2 ounces; 1 egg; cracked ice (a small quantity); malted milk, teaspoonful. Shake well and add small malted milk, teaspoonful. Shake well and add small stream soda. Sprinkle small quantity of salt and serve like egg phosphate.
A fountain drink from the era when the soda jerk worked with a shaker, a spoon and a carbonated-water tap. The mixing is straightforward; the whole raw egg is the problem.
- Why the cautionA whole raw shell egg is shaken into the glass and never heated at any point. Raw eggs carry a risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean, ungraded egg, and a cold shaken drink gives the organism nothing to knock it back. If you want an egg-based fountain drink, use a current recipe written with that hazard in mind.
- The dairy compounds itSweet cream and malted milk powder are shaken with ice and served cold, so the whole drink sits in the temperature range where anything introduced by the egg will survive. Nothing in the method reduces the risk.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesTwo ounces of chocolate syrup and two of cream are quarter-cups each. The recipe does not say how large the finished glass was; the soda simply fills it out.
- "Sweet cream"Not sweetened cream, but fresh cream as opposed to soured or cultured. Ordinary heavy or light cream is the equivalent term today.
- Malted milkThe plain, unflavoured malted milk powder of the period, a dried blend of malted barley, wheat and milk. Modern malt powder is close, though many supermarket tins are chocolate-flavoured and sweeter than the plain fountain product.
- "Small stream soda"Carbonated water delivered from the narrow side of the fountain tap, a fine jet rather than the coarse gush, so the drink is filled without knocking the foam flat. A soda siphon or seltzer poured down a bar spoon does the same job.
- "Serve like egg phosphate"Egg phosphates were handed over immediately with a straw and a spoon. The instruction most likely refers to the manner of serving rather than to adding acid phosphate to this drink, though the book does not spell that out.
- The saltSalt turns up in a number of fountain egg drinks of the period. The small pinch called for here would sharpen the chocolate and offset the flatness of the egg white, the same reasoning behind salting a modern chocolate dessert.
Parfait Amour is also the name of a violet-and-citrus liqueur of eighteenth-century origin, and soda fountains borrowed such names for drinks they wanted to make sound continental and romantic. The drink itself belongs to the fountain's egg-and-malt family, which grew out of the late nineteenth-century belief that these were tonic foods for invalids and the run-down: malted milk is generally traced to Horlick's of Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1880s, and was marketed first as an infant and convalescent food before the fountain trade discovered it went well with chocolate. Egg drinks were a fountain staple through the temperance years and into Prohibition, when the drugstore counter took over much of the social business of the saloon.