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Royal Cabinet
Break 1 egg in mixing glass, add 1 ounce Catawba syrup, 1 ounce vanilla syrup, ½ ounce strawberry syrup, 2 ounces plain cream, shake well with ice, use fine stream and serve in bell glass. Beginners are advised to stick close to the popular and well established flavors - Vanilla, Chocolate, Lemon, Strawberry, Pineapple, Raspberry, Orange and Sarsaparilla,
A fountain egg drink of the sort that filled the middle pages of every dispenser's manual around 1900. The reason it cannot be recommended today is the whole egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Raw shell egg, unheatedThe egg goes into the mixing glass whole and is shaken with ice and syrup only; nothing in the procedure comes near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella in yolk and white. Cold shaking with ice does nothing to the risk, and the drink is served immediately to be consumed at fountain temperature. Anyone who wants an egg drink today should follow a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs.
- "Plain cream"At a 1900s fountain this meant fresh dairy cream; pasteurisation was not yet universal, so it may well have been raw. Combined with the raw egg it is a second unheated animal-protein ingredient.
- Catawba syrupA flavouring syrup based on the Catawba grape, an American variety of largely Vitis labrusca parentage with a foxy character like Concord's. The grape is still grown, but Catawba syrup has all but vanished from commerce; period formularies give it as grape juice, sugar and a little acid.
- Fountain measuresThe ounces here are fluid ounces from a graduated syrup pump or jigger, so the drink is 2½ ounces of syrup to 2 of cream before carbonation. That is a sweet base by modern standards, intended to be cut with a long draw of soda.
- "Fine stream" and "bell glass"The fine stream is the narrow nozzle on the soda draught arm, as against the coarse stream used for filling; manuals differ on exactly when each was called for. A bell glass is a footed, flared fountain tumbler.
- YieldOne drink.
The soda fountain of the 1890s and 1900s made heavy use of eggs: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg chocolates and elaborate house specialties like this one. The egg was understood as much as a tonic as a flavor, part of the fountain's descent from the drugstore dispensary, where the counter sold health as well as refreshment. The parting advice in this entry is the honest part of the trade literature -- manuals of this period often reminded the new dispenser that customers ordered vanilla and chocolate far more often than anything with a fancy name, and that a fountain lived on its standard flavors. Catawba, named for the river that runs through the Carolinas, is generally counted among the early American grapes grown commercially for wine and juice, which is why its syrup turns up so often in fountain books and almost nowhere since.