The Outdated-Faculty Brooklyn Drink That’s Creamy, Foamy, and Good for Summer time

I am a Brooklyn authentic. I grew up within the borough again when youngsters nonetheless performed stickball on the street and most folk from elsewhere have been too afraid to hop on the subway and go to. I did loads of assembly mates in Manhattan again then. However these individuals missed out on one other Brooklyn authentic: the egg cream.

For a lot of my youth, I lived across the nook from Tom’s Restaurant (sometimes known as Tom’s Diner) on Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights. Tom’s is a Brooklyn establishment that opened in 1936, when the Dodgers have been nonetheless enjoying at Ebbets Subject only a handful of blocks away. Tom’s is a diner, but it surely’s additionally a soda fountain, and dates from a time when soda fountains have been widespread. Whereas they all the time touted their cherry lime rickey as their signature drink, my breakfast order all the time included a chocolate egg cream, one other soda-fountain traditional, delivered by the late proprietor, Gus Vlahavas, who would, with out fail, ask me how the remainder of my household was doing.

An egg cream is a tough factor to explain to the uninitiated. It is arduous to make a mix of milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup sound good—and that is after you have cleared up the truth that there isn’t a egg concerned in any respect. (There are many theories about the way it obtained its identify, together with cutesy ones about it being a corruption of Yiddish, however almost definitely the reply lies in older associated drinks that did embody egg.)

However one sip and it is simple to grasp: The egg cream is one half wealthy, two elements refreshing—all chilly and frivolously fizzy—and has a signature chocolate taste that squeals with the faintly electrical, metallic tang of the very particular model of chocolate syrup: Fox’s U-Wager.

I’ve by no means had an egg cream that tasted proper when made with different widespread chocolate syrups, equivalent to Hershey’s. What precisely makes U-Wager style the best way it does, I am unable to confidently say. Possibly it is one of many flavorings, or possibly it is the potassium sorbate added as a preservative. Or possibly I simply dreamt it, a false sense reminiscence collected over so many youth. I feel it is actual, although, and I might argue it is necessary.

This is the factor: A chocolate egg cream is a really, quite simple beverage, but it surely’s weirdly tough to make excellent. The explanation comes all the way down to the way it was historically made in soda fountains of previous. There, the soda jerk would pour milk right into a tall glass, then shoot a concentrated jet of extremely pressurized seltzer into it, making a violent collision that will froth and aerate the milk. This is able to type the drink’s signature white foam cap.

Then, the jerk would drizzle within the chocolate syrup in a skinny stream, slicing a small gap by means of the white foam cap with out damaging it, and shortly spin a spoon beneath that higher foam–cloud layer to mix the chocolate with the fizzy milk beneath. The result’s a drink with a visual divide between the pure white foam cap and the frivolously chocolaty drink beneath.

Doing that at house is tough. Pouring seltzer from a can or bottle will not create the pressurized fizz essential to froth the milk, and my makes an attempt with CO2-charged water from an iSi siphon have been disappointing—it is difficult to get that water sufficiently carbonated, regardless of how lengthy it sits within the fridge to sit back and dissolve CO2.

The Egg Cream Soda Answer

The answer for a correct egg cream at house lies in one other technique of aerating drinks: a cocktail shaker. It really works like this:

• Add a single ice dice to the shaker, which helps preserve the liquids chilly and helps agitate the milk throughout shaking, for higher aeration and foaming.
• Pour within the milk and a small quantity of seltzer and shake vigorously. The seltzer will go flat from the shaking, but it surely introduces fuel to helps the milk foam.
• Then take away the ice dice, pour the foamed milk into your glass, prime up with the remainder of the seltzer (the true supply of carbonation), and blend within the chocolate syrup.

The strategy works nice—nearly too nicely. Typically I obtained a lot foam I did not have room for the total drink beneath it. (The answer to that’s easy: shake rather less and/or skip pouring all the froth into the glass.)

It is a correct Brooklyn egg cream from a Brooklynite who claims the best to name it that—made at house with out a soda gun or a classic glass seltzer siphon.

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