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Royal Flip
Queen nectar syrup, ½ ounce; clarade syrup, 1 ounce; white and yolk of 1 egg; fresh cream, 1 ounce; cracked ice, ¼ glass. Shake well together, strain and add 1 dash curacoa cordial and plain soda sufficient to fill tumbler.
A fountain flip is a raw whole egg shaken with syrup, cream and soda water and drunk immediately. The technique, the syrups and the safety assumptions behind it all belong to 1900.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whole egg, white and yolk, goes into the glass uncooked and stays that way; nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the cracked ice keeps the mixture cold throughout. Shell eggs of unknown provenance served raw to the public is precisely the practice that egg-safety regulation was written to end. If you want a flip today, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg.
- Cream held at fountain temperatureCream, unheated -- The cream goes in raw and the drink is assembled and served cold, with no heat step at any point. Nothing in the recipe indicates how the cream was stored or whether it was pasteurised.
- Queen nectar syrupA proprietary fountain syrup, not a standard formula; the compounding recipe is not given here. There is no modern equivalent on a shelf.
- Clarade syrupAnother fountain-counter preparation whose formula is not given here. Like queen nectar, the name tells a modern reader nothing about the flavour without the parent formula.
- Curacoa cordialThe old spelling of curaçao, a sweetened orange-peel liqueur. A "dash" at the fountain meant a single quick shake from a dasher-topped bottle, roughly a scant teaspoon.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesFountain formulas were written in fluid measure throughout: 1 ounce is 2 tablespoons, half an ounce is 1 tablespoon. "Cracked ice, 1/4 glass" means about a quarter of a glassful of cracked ice.
- One tumblerThe recipe makes a single drink in a fountain tumbler, most of the volume arriving as soda water at the end.
"Flip" is much older than the soda fountain: from the seventeenth century onward it meant a drink of beer or spirit with egg and sugar, often heated by plunging a red-hot iron loggerhead into the mug. American temperance culture and the rise of the drug-store fountain in the second half of the nineteenth century pulled the form away from alcohol, and dispensers rebuilt the flip around cream, proprietary syrups and carbonated water while keeping the egg, which gave body and a thick foam no syrup alone could produce. Names like "Royal" and "Queen nectar" are marketing rather than description; fountain manuals of this period are full of them. The egg drink survived at the counter well into the twentieth century, and it is often said to lie behind the malted milk and the egg cream, though the story that the egg cream took its name from a lost egg is folk explanation rather than documented fact.