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Vanilla Puff
One ounce vanilla syrup, I white of egg, 1 ounce cream, 1 tablespoonful brandy. Shake well; add spoonful of whipped cream, and fill cup with hot water.
A hot fountain drink from the era when the soda counter sold as much in January as in July. The problem with it today is the egg: the white goes in raw, is shaken cold, and then meets nothing hotter than a cup of draught hot water, which will not bring it anywhere near a temperature that kills Salmonella.
- The raw white never cooksHot water drawn from a fountain urn, poured over a cold shaken mixture of syrup, cream and egg in a china cup, lands well under the temperature and holding time needed to pasteurize egg. Treat it as a raw-egg preparation, because that is what it is.
- Whole shell eggs are the riskEgg white is not the innocent half of the egg here; contamination sits on and in the shell and is spread by separating. A modern recipe built on pasteurized egg white or aquafaba should be used instead.
- The brandy does nothingA tablespoon of spirit in a six- or eight-ounce cup gives an alcohol concentration far too low to sterilize anything.
- Ounces here are fluid ouncesFountain work was generally measured by the graduate glass rather than the scale. An ounce of vanilla syrup is two tablespoons, and the ounce of cream likewise.
- In fountain usage a puff is a hot drink shaken up with egg and cream and lengthened with hot water rather than soda, the counterpart of a cold egg phosphate. The shaking is presumably what the name refers to, though that is not documented.
- YieldOne cup, roughly six to eight ounces once the hot water is added.
American soda fountains were an outgrowth of the drugstore, and their winter trade in hot drinks — beef tea, hot lemonade, hot malted milk, egg phosphates and puffs like this one — sat squarely in the space between refreshment and medicine. Egg drinks in particular carried a reputation as nourishment for the run-down and the convalescent, which is why so many of them appear in dispensers' formularies alongside genuine pharmacy preparations. Formula books of this kind were trade manuals, sold to the man behind the counter so he could work quickly from a numbered list, and they circulated widely until Prohibition thinned out the alcoholic entries and the fountain drifted toward ice cream and cola.