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Pineapple Puff
Mixing glass, 2 ounces plain, sweet cream, add the white of 1 egg, whip with a bar spoon until it is well whipped, add ½ ounces pineapple syrup, transfer into shaker and add soda from both streams; then pour from shaker to 12-ounce glass and serve without straws.
A fountain drink from the era when the soda clerk was a kind of bartender. The technique is straightforward; the problem is the egg.
- Raw egg whiteThe white is whipped and served without any heat step at all. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and the risk falls hardest on children, older drinkers, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — much of the fountain's actual clientele. Use a current recipe if you want a drink of this style.
- "Soda from both streams"Fountain draft arms delivered carbonated water through more than one stream, commonly a coarse stream and a fine one; the coarse gave volume and foam, the fine a smoother fizz. The instruction most likely means to use both in turn, though the recipe does not say in which order.
- Plain, sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured rather than sweetened. Two ounces is a quarter cup; the nearest modern equivalent is light cream, though period cream was not standardised for fat.
- Pineapple syrupA fountain syrup, not canned juice: heavy sugar syrup flavoured with pineapple, closer in sweetness to grenadine than to anything in the juice aisle. Half an ounce is a tablespoon.
- The mixing glass and bar spoonThe mixing glass is the tall unlidded tumbler; the bar spoon is a long-handled spoon. Whipping cream and white together by hand with it takes real effort and produces a loose foam rather than stiff peaks.
- Serve without strawsThe instruction is explicit in the recipe. The likely reason is that the foam is meant to reach the lip, which a straw would bypass, though the recipe gives no reason.
- YieldOne 12-ounce glass, as the recipe specifies.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grouped their drinks into families with recognisable patterns: a phosphate took acid phosphate, and drinks of the puff type took cream and egg white beaten to a froth so the carbonated water would lift it into a head. Pineapple was one of a number of common fountain flavours. Raw eggs were unremarkable at the fountain -- egg phosphates, egg lemonades and flips all appear in the same books -- and such drinks were often promoted as nourishing, the drugstore counter still trading on its medicinal ancestry. Drinks of this kind faded through the twentieth century.