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White Mountain Foam
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Cream, ¼ tumblerful; Egg, white of, 1; Orange Syrup, 1 ounce. Draw soda water, fine stream.
This is a fountain drink built on raw egg white and unpasteurized cream, whipped up on the marble counter and handed straight over. That construction is the reason it cannot be reproduced as written.
- Raw egg whiteThe single white goes into the glass uncooked and is never heated at any stage. Whole shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and internally, and a cold soda-fountain drink neither kills it nor slows it. Nothing in the procedure brings any ingredient above refrigerator temperature.
- Cream held at the counterDepending on the date and place, fountain cream may not have been pasteurized, and it was typically kept in an iced well rather than under controlled refrigeration. A quarter tumbler of possibly unpasteurized cream, whipped with raw white, is a second hazard alongside the egg rather than a variation on it.
- No safe substitution is impliedEgg-white foam drinks of this type are still made, but they depend on pasteurized product and controlled handling that the original text does not describe. If you want a modern foam soda, work from a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- A tumbler, for referenceFountain tumblers of the era ran somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 ounces, so "½ tumblerful" of shaved ice means the glass is roughly half filled before anything else goes in. The ice and cream are given as fractions of the glass; the syrup is given as a fixed ounce.
- Orange syrupFountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup, flavored with orange in various ways depending on the manual. It was generally much sweeter and less acidic than modern orange juice or cordial, which is why one ounce can carry the whole drink.
- "Fine stream"Soda apparatus of the day had two draws: a coarse stream for filling and a fine one for aerating. The fine stream was used precisely because it whipped egg white and cream into the foam the name promises without flattening the carbonation.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are essentially bartending books with the alcohol removed, and they borrowed the vocabulary wholesale: egg and cream drinks like this one are direct cousins of the egg flip and the silver fizz, with orange syrup standing in for spirit. The scenic names White Mountain, Klondike, Egyptian, and dozens more were marketing rather than geography, meant to be read off a placard and pointed at, though "White Mountain" here may well refer to the peak of stiff white foam the fine stream raised in the glass. The dispenser worked at speed in front of the customer, which explains the shorthand form of these entries: a list of proportions and one line of technique, written for someone who already knew how the machine behaved. It also explains the raw egg. Behind the counter there was ice, syrup pumps, and gas pressure, and a drink like this one was assembled cold.