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Silver Standard
White of 1 egg, 1½ ounces Catawba syrup, ¼ glass cracked ice. Shake and fill glass with pure milk. Shake again, and serve in thin glass.
A fountain drink from the era when a soda clerk cracked eggs to order. The vocabulary and the measures need translating, but the central problem is that nothing in the glass is ever heated.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe white is shaken cold and served cold. Eggs in the shell can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the white and yolk, and shaking with ice does nothing to it. Nothing in this glass is ever brought to a temperature that would kill it.
- The milk of the period"Pure milk" at a fountain most likely meant plain milk rather than cream or condensed milk. Milk of the period may or may not have been pasteurised, and unpasteurised milk was a known vehicle for bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis and typhoid in these years.
- If you want an egg drinkUse a current recipe from a source that specifies the egg handling. We are not going to restate this one with times and temperatures attached.
- "½ ounces"Almost certainly a printer's slip for half a fluid ounce, about a tablespoon. That is a light hand for a fountain syrup, which was more often poured by the ounce.
- A "glass"The unit is the fountain's own soda glass, perhaps 10 to 12 ounces. "¼ glass cracked ice" is therefore something like 2½ to 3 ounces of ice, and the milk fills whatever room is left.
- Catawba syrupA flavoring syrup made from the Catawba grape, an American variety of labrusca parentage once grown heavily along the Ohio River. It is not a stock item now; grape syrups on the shelf today are Concord or generic, and taste noticeably different.
- "Thin glass"Fountain trade language for a fine-walled tumbler rather than the heavy pressed glass used for sodas.
The name is often said to be a political joke. Through the 1890s American public life was consumed by the currency question -- whether silver should be coined freely alongside gold. In fountain shorthand a "silver" drink was one built on the white of the egg and a "golden" one on the yolk, so the pun worked twice over: the color in the glass and the slogan in the newspaper. Egg drinks were a serious part of the fountain trade rather than a novelty. Before soda fountains were mainly places to buy sweets they were attached to drugstores, and an egg shaken into milk was sold as a restorative for the thin, the dyspeptic and the convalescent, which is why so many of them carry so little flavoring. The manuals of the period print dozens of these formulas, all of them assuming an egg cracked to order and a glass drunk on the spot -- an assumption a modern kitchen cannot make.