Home › At the Fountain › Temptress Chadwick
Temptress Chadwick
Catawba, 2 ounces; white of 1 egg, a little shaved ice; fill with milk and shake thoroughly. Top off with whipped cream and serve with a spoon.
A fountain drink of the shaken-egg family, built in a mixing glass at the counter and served at once. The reason it cannot be made as written is the egg, but several other things in the line need translating.
- The raw egg is the problemThe white of one egg goes into the shaker uncooked and is never heated at any stage. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and unlike a raw yolk in a batter or a custard there is no later cooking step here to bring it to a safe temperature. Nothing in the drink — not the ice, not the acidity of grape juice, not the alcohol if wine is used — reliably inactivates it.
- Who is most at riskEven where the risk is low it is not evenly distributed. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised should not drink an uncooked egg preparation at all. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe written around pasteurised eggs or a pasteurised white.
- What "Catawba" means hereAmbiguous, and the book does not say. In fountain work of the period the word was often used for Catawba grape syrup or unfermented Catawba grape juice, but the same word also named a still or sparkling American wine made from the grape. Two ounces of syrup and two ounces of wine give very different drinks.
- Shaved ice, not cubesFountain shaved ice was fine and snowy, meant to chill and dilute in the few seconds of shaking. "A little" is perhaps a tablespoon or two — enough to make the shake bite, not enough to water down a twelve-ounce glass.
- "Fill with milk"The recipe does not say which vessel; since the milk is added before shaking it presumably goes into the mixing glass, with the drink then poured out and capped with cream. Fountain glasses of the era were commonly in the range of 10 to 12 ounces, which would make the drink mostly milk with two ounces of flavouring.
- Acid and milkGrape juice or wine shaken into cold milk is acidic enough to flocculate the casein, so a drink of this kind is best served immediately; left standing it can separate and look curdled.
- YieldOne glass, and it was meant to be drunk at the counter. The spoon is for the whipped cream on top, which was eaten rather than sipped through.
The Catawba grape, a native American variety generally traced to the Carolina piedmont and named for the Catawba River, became the backbone of the nineteenth-century Ohio Valley wine trade before disease, changing tastes and rival grapes such as Concord pushed it aside; by the soda-fountain era its most common commercial life was as a bottled juice or a sweetened fountain syrup, valued for a pink-purple colour and a musky, faintly foxy flavour that read as distinctly American. Egg drinks were fountain staples in the same years — the shaken white gave body and a foam collar that plain milk could not, and dispensers advertised them as nourishing, a claim that placed the fountain somewhere between confectioner's shop and drugstore. The name looks like trade whimsy: fountain manuals of the period carry many similarly fanciful names, invented so a soda clerk had something to call a formula and a customer had something to point at on the board.