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Royal Egg Phosphate
Red cherry syrup, 2 ounces; cherry rum, 2 or 3 dashes; sweet cream, 4 ounces; 1 egg, a little cracked ice. Shake all together, fill shaker with soda, toss into the glass, top with grated nutmeg and serve with a straw.
This is a fountain drink built on a whole raw egg that is never heated at any stage, which is the reason it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain the terms and the specific problem.
- The raw egg is the hingeThe egg goes into the shaker uncooked and reaches the glass uncooked, shielded only by cold syrup, cream and carbonated water. Nothing in the procedure brings it near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell. Fountain-era drinks of this kind were commonly offered as nourishing tonics; that assumption no longer holds.
- Cream compounds itFour ounces of sweet cream in the same shaker, shaken with cracked ice and served cold, gives any organism present a hospitable medium.
- If you want an egg drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg. That is the only change that addresses the problem, and it belongs in a modern source rather than here.
- "Phosphate" is missing from the formulaA phosphate at the fountain meant a drink soured with a dash of acid phosphate, a dilute phosphoric acid solution sold by the gallon to druggists. No acid phosphate appears in this list, so the title reflects the drink's place on the menu board rather than its contents.
- Cherry rumAt the fountain this was most likely a flavoring extract rather than a spirit; dispensers stocked "rum" and "brandy" flavors, and whatever alcohol was present came from the extract itself.
- Fountain measuresA dash is a small squirt from a dash bottle, on the order of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon. Two ounces of syrup and four of cream, plus however much soda the shaker took, made a tall drink; the recipe does not state the glass size.
Egg drinks were part of the American soda fountain's claim to be a branch of the drug trade rather than a candy counter. Fountains grew out of pharmacies, where carbonated water had been dispensed since the early nineteenth century as a vehicle for medicinal salts, and acid phosphate, celery tonic, beef extract and raw egg all sat on the same marble counter as cherry and vanilla syrup. A whole egg beaten into cream and soda was sold frankly as nourishment, the sort of thing recommended for invalids and thin children. The nutmeg on top follows the older custom of finishing eggnog, milk punch and syllabub the same way, a habit well established before soda water.