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White House
One-half ounce orange syrup, ½ ounce Catawba syrup, ½ ounce pineapple syrup, white of 1 egg, ⅓ glass shaved ice. Fill glass with milk. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain egg drink of the type sold by the thousand from marble counters before the First World War. The raw egg white is the problem, and it is not incidental — it is the body of the drink.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white of one egg goes into cold milk and shaved ice and is served immediately. Nothing in the procedure brings the egg above refrigerator temperature, so Salmonella present in or on the shell is neither killed nor inhibited.
- Why shaking does not helpAgitation with ice aerates the white and disperses it through the milk, which is the whole point of the texture, but it also distributes any bacteria evenly through the glass. There is no dilution effect worth counting on here.
- Milk as wellFountain milk of the period was frequently unpasteurised, and the recipe assumes it is drunk raw and cold. Combined with raw egg in a sweet, room-temperature-friendly medium, this is a drink that had to be consumed within minutes of mixing.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe for an egg cream or egg-white fountain drink written for pasteurised eggs or egg products. Do not adapt the timings or quantities above.
- Reading the measuresThe ounces are fluid ounces of finished syrup, roughly one tablespoon each, so the flavouring comes to about three tablespoons total; the recipe gives no glass size, only that ice fills a third of it and milk the rest. "Toss" means pouring the mixture between two glasses to raise the foam, not discarding anything.
- Catawba syrupMade from the Catawba, an American hybrid grape of largely Vitis labrusca character, with the same musky note as Concord. Nothing on a supermarket shelf is sold under that name now; grape syrup is the nearest equivalent in flavour terms.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s are full of egg drinks — egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg creams, egg nogs served cold from the counter — because the dispenser was selling a restorative as much as a treat, and a raw egg was a ready way to make a glass of flavoured milk feel like food. Drinks named for the White House, the Capitol or a sitting president were a standard piece of fountain naming, applied fairly loosely to whatever the compiler wanted to dress up; the name here may simply signal the pale colour that the beaten white and milk give the glass, though no connection to a presidential household is documented either way. The three-syrup combination of orange, grape and pineapple is typical of the trade's approach to flavour, which was to blend from the bottles already on the rail rather than to build anything from fruit.