Home › At the Fountain › Square Meal
Square Meal
A Very Hearty Drink.
Draw 2 ounces of American Chocolate Syrup into shaker, break in a fresh egg, add a spoonful of ice cream, and fill shaker with milk. Shake thoroughly, pour into a glass and top with grated nutmeg.
A soda-fountain "square meal" — the egg drink that stood in for lunch at the counter. The raw egg is the whole point of the drink and also the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The raw eggThe egg is broken into the shaker and never heated at any stage; nothing in the drink rises above refrigerator temperature. A shell egg can carry Salmonella both on the shell and inside the egg, and a milk-and-syrup drink held at room temperature while it is shaken and served is a fair growth medium. Fountain practice appears to have relied on the egg being very fresh and drunk immediately, which does not address the hazard. Use a current recipe if you want an egg drink.
- Who it was sold toEgg drinks were commonly recommended for invalids and convalescents. Those are among the groups for whom an uncooked egg is most dangerous now.
- "Draw 2 ounces"Fountain syrup was drawn by the pump stroke; two ounces is a quarter cup. Period soda syrups were generally thinner than a modern bottled chocolate sauce.
- American Chocolate SyrupMost likely a fountain formula rather than a product you can buy today: broadly cocoa, sugar and water cooked to a thin pouring syrup, sometimes with salt and vanilla.
- "A spoonful of ice cream"Here this means a small scoop rather than a float, used for body and cold. The recipe does not specify a flavour.
- Fill the shakerThe milk simply makes up the volume of the shaker after the syrup, egg and ice cream. It yields one tall glass -- a single serving meant to replace a meal.
The soda fountain sold food as much as refreshment, and the egg drink was its lunch counter before there was a lunch counter: milk, sugar, fat and a whole egg in a glass, drunk standing up in the time it took to shake it. Fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s are full of egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg malteds and egg chocolates, frequently recommended for invalids and for men who had no time to sit down. The nutmeg on top is often said to be inherited from much older egg-and-milk drinks — posset, syllabub, eggnog — where, it is suggested, grated spice masked the eggy smell and signalled that the glass was a restorative rather than a treat. What the drink really records is a period in which raw egg was regarded as a wholesome tonic, an idea that survived in American soda fountains and gyms well into the twentieth century before food-safety understanding caught up with it.