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Sherry Flip
One ounce of "Don't Care" syrup, 4 dashes of sherry, 1 egg, a little cream, cracked ice. Shake up well, fill glass with fine stream, strain into a clean glass and sprinkle ground nutmeg on top.
A fountain flip in the pharmacy sense: a shaken egg drink finished with carbonated water. The problem is the egg, which is never heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe whole egg goes into the shaker raw and the drink is served cold, so nothing in the process brings it near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella. Fountain practice assumed a fresh shell egg cracked to order was safe; that assumption no longer holds for an uncooked drink. If you want a flip, work from a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- "Don't Care" syrupA fountain trade name rather than a fixed formula. It is generally understood to have been a house blend of several fruit syrups, in some accounts the day's leftovers combined; the name is usually explained that way, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Formulas would have varied from counter to counter.
- DashesA dash from a fountain dash bottle is roughly an eighth to a quarter teaspoon, so four dashes is somewhere around half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of sherry. This is a flavouring rather than a drink with any real quantity of wine in it, which may be part of why such things sat comfortably on a temperance-era counter.
- "A little cream"Unquantified in the original and genuinely ambiguous. Fountain usage of the period would suggest something on the order of half an ounce to an ounce of heavy or light cream, enough to soften the egg without making the drink heavy.
- "Fine stream"The soda draft arm had coarse and fine streams. The fine stream was used to build foam and blend, which is what carries the beaten egg into a head; the coarse stream was for filling volume quickly.
- Two glassesThe shake is strained into a clean glass, not served from the mixing vessel. That was standard fountain presentation, and the ground nutmeg goes on top of the finished drink rather than into the shaker.
The flip is much older than the soda fountain: in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and colonial America it meant ale or spirits sweetened, sometimes beaten with egg, and heated by plunging in a red-hot iron loggerhead. What the nineteenth-century American drugstore did was take the egg-and-sugar body, drop the heat and the ale, and rebuild the drink over cracked ice and carbonated water. Sherry may have survived into the fountain version partly out of habit and partly, it is often suggested, because it was still regarded as a mild tonic, the sort of thing a pharmacist could dispense by the dash without leaving the medicinal register. Egg drinks of this kind were sold as strengthening and were pushed at customers thought to be run down, and nutmeg, long associated with restoratives and possets, finishes the glass.