Home › At the Fountain › Silver Fizz, Hot
Silver Fizz, Hot
One white of egg, juice of 1 lemon, 3 spoonfuls powdered sugar. Mix with spoon and stir while adding hot soda. Serve nutmeg and cinnamon.
A hot fountain drink from the era when marble counters had a hot-water tap alongside the carbonated draught. The problem is the egg: it is the body of the drink and it is never cooked.
- Why the egg is the issueThe white is beaten with lemon and sugar and then loosened with hot water poured in while stirring. Even water drawn at 180F drops far below that on contact with a cold glass and a cold egg, and nothing holds the mixture at a temperature that would deal with Salmonella. A shell egg cracked into a warm drink is a raw egg for food-safety purposes; current recipes for egg-white drinks specify pasteurized whites for exactly this reason.
- "Hot soda" is not sodaAt a period fountain the hot tap dispensed plain hot water, sometimes lightly mineralised; carbonation will not survive heat. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fountain manuals treated hot soda water as a winter counterpart to the cold trade, not as a fizzy drink.
- A spoonful is a barspoonA spoonful is probably a barspoon -- Fountain books usually mean the long-handled bar spoon, roughly a teaspoon, which would make three spoonfuls of powdered sugar something in the region of a tablespoon, though the recipe itself does not say. Powdered sugar of the day was finely ground cane sugar, closer to what is sold as caster or superfine than to modern confectioners' sugar, which carries added cornstarch.
- Why "silver"In fizz nomenclature silver means egg white, gold means yolk, and royal means the whole egg. The name is doing the work of an ingredient list.
- The garnish"Serve nutmeg and cinnamon" means dusted over the surface at the counter, as with a hot flip or an egg nog. Grating whole nutmeg was common practice, though ground nutmeg was also sold ready-made.
- YieldOne glass. Fountain formulas are written per serving, for a soda glass of roughly 8 to 10 ounces.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written around pasteurized egg white rather than adapting this one.
The soda fountain of 1900 was as much a pharmacy counter as a candy shop, and its hot department existed to sell something in the months when nobody wanted ice. Hot soda water, hot beef tea, hot malted milk and hot egg drinks filled the winter columns of trade manuals, and drinks like this one borrowed their structure straight from the bar: the fizz, a sour lengthened with charged water, and the flip, an egg drink served warm. Egg was valued at the fountain for texture and for its reputation as a restorative, which is why so many of these formulas were sold to invalids and to customers with a cold. The naming convention — silver for white, gold for yolk — is generally traced to the bartending guides of the 1880s and 1890s, from which fountain dispensers borrowed freely, minus the spirits.