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Raspberry Punch
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Egg, 1; Raspberry Syrup, 2 ounces. A few squirts of rum and Florida orange extract, colored red with ruby, milk enough to fill glass nearly full. Shake well, add small amount of soda water, fine stream, and grate a little nutmeg on top.
A fountain drink of the flavored-egg-shake family, built in the glass and finished with carbonated water. The raw egg is the reason it cannot be recommended as written, but the rest of the formula also needs translating out of counter shorthand.
- The raw eggThe whole egg is beaten into cold syrup and milk and never heated at any point. Salmonella in a shell egg survives everything this recipe does to it, and the drink then sits in milk at fountain temperature, which is a hospitable medium. Soda-fountain manuals of this era assumed a fresh egg was a safe egg; that assumption does not hold. If you want an egg drink, work from a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- "A few squirts"Fountain syrup and flavour bottles were fitted with pump or squirt stoppers rather than measured with a spoon, so the quantity is left to the dispenser. Given that it is listed alongside the Florida orange extract, "rum" here is almost certainly rum extract or flavouring from the flavour rack rather than spirits.
- RubyEvidently a red colouring of the sort supplied for fountain use. Colourings of the period were often coal-tar dyes, some of them never approved for food, and there is no way to know what a given bottle contained. Nothing about the drink requires it.
- TumblerfulA fountain tumbler of the period ran roughly 10 to 12 ounces, so half a tumbler of shaved ice is about 5 or 6 ounces by volume, filling the glass better than half full once the liquids go in.
- "Fine stream"Fountain draught arms offered more than one setting, including a coarse stream and a fine stream. The fine stream is the gentler one, which is why it is specified for a milk drink here.
- YieldOne glass; the recipe is built in the serving glass itself.
Soda-fountain egg drinks belong to a long tradition that runs back through egg nog and the tavern flip, and by the turn of the century the dispenser had inherited them from the bartender. The word "punch" here has drifted a long way from its origins: no spirits are involved, only rum extract from the flavoring rack, and the name signals a mixed, spiced, garnished drink rather than an alcoholic one. That substitution is often said to have been commercially deliberate. Fountains competed directly with saloons for the same afternoon customer, and formularies of the period are full of dry punches, cobblers, sours and fizzes rebuilt around extracts, syrups and carbonated water. The grating of nutmeg over the top is plausibly read as a survival of the original: much what a barman did to a flip, done at a marble counter instead.