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Soda Cream
M. G. Rand.
Two and one-half pounds white sugar, one-eighth pound tartaric acid, both dissolved in one quart of hot water; when cold, add the beaten whites of three eggs, stirring well; bottle for use. Put two large spoons of this syrup in a glass of cold water, and stir in it one-fourth of a spoon of bicarbonate of soda. Any flavour can be put in the syrup. An excellent drink for summer.
This is a home version of a soda-fountain syrup, and the problem is the eggs. The whites go in raw, the syrup is never heated after they are added, and the bottle is then kept and drawn from over days at room temperature.
- Raw egg white, storedThe whites are beaten into a cooled syrup and bottled with no cooking step and no refrigeration. Salmonella on or in shell eggs is the specific risk, and an ambient-temperature sugar syrup at this dilution is not acidic or concentrated enough to be reliably self-preserving.
- The acid does not sterilise itOne-eighth pound of tartaric acid in a quart does lower the pH, but the recipe gives no measured pH, no holding temperature and no time, so nothing here can be verified as a kill step. A modern drink or shrub recipe should be used instead.
- Why the egg was thereThe whites were for foam and body, giving the drink the head that commercial soda fountains produced with gum arabic or egg albumen. It contributes almost nothing to flavour, and later syrup recipes often omit it.
- Tartaric acid and bicarbonateThese are the working parts: the acid in the syrup meets the bicarbonate of soda in the glass and fizzes on the spot. Both are still sold as food-grade ingredients, and the mechanism is the same one behind a modern effervescent tablet.
- Quantities, for scaleTwo and a half pounds of sugar to a quart of water is a very heavy syrup. Two large spoons make a single glass, so a quart yields roughly thirty glasses, and the bottle would have been kept and drawn from over an extended period -- which is precisely the storage problem.
- "One-fourth of a spoon"Spoon sizes in this book are not standardised, and a large spoon is nearer a modern tablespoon than a teaspoon. The soda measure is genuinely ambiguous, and too much of it leaves a soapy, alkaline taste.
Soda water moved out of the pharmacy and into the American home over the second half of the nineteenth century, and recipes like this one are the domestic answer to the drugstore fountain: rather than pressurised carbonated water, the fizz is generated in the glass by acid meeting bicarbonate at the moment of drinking. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1870s) was compiled from contributed recipes, each signed by its donor, and M. G. Rand's syrup is typical of what such books collected under the heading of summer drinks alongside lemonades, shrubs and raspberry vinegars. Tartaric acid, then cheap and widely stocked by grocers as a baking-powder component and lemon substitute, did double duty here. The instruction that "any flavour can be put in the syrup" reflects how these drinks were actually made at home: one base syrup, then lemon, vanilla or raspberry extract to taste, in imitation of the row of labelled pumps at the commercial fountain.