Transcript of “The Mystery Drink Known as the “Egg Cream”: No Egg, No Cream”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Grant and Martha. What a delight to be speaking with you. This is Carl. I’m calling from Sebastopol, California in beautiful Sonoma County.
Oh, hi, Carl. Welcome to the show. It’s very lovely there.
It sure is. Well, my question is one that goes all the way back to my childhood, and it’s about the name of a drink that we had a lot of when I was growing up.
So the background is that I was born early in the baby boom generation and lived for the first decade of my life in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City with my parents. We were Jewish, and so I grew up generally aware of the long history of Jewish immigrants settling on the Lower East Side.
But I really didn’t know a lot about the details of all of that until I was maybe 10 years old and came across my mother’s copy of Harry Golden’s book for Two Cents Plain. And I started reading about the history of Jewish immigration and got to know something about some of the organizations that I had firsthand contact with.
And I also learned what the name of Golden’s book meant. And it was the way that a Jewish immigrant might order a glass of plain seltzer for two cents specified the size of the glass. And plain meant no syrup because maybe they just wanted it plain or maybe they didn’t have the extra couple of pennies that they needed to have the syrup.
So the drink that I grew up with is kind of related to that. It was a mixture of milk and seltzer or carbonated water with chocolate syrup stirred into it. And we called it an egg cream. And I never understood why we called it an egg cream, because it had neither eggs nor cream.
And so, of course, you know, being a modern baby boomer, I looked it up on the Internet and I read that, well, egg might come from the German and Yiddish word echte or e, which means genuine. But then the name becomes genuine cream, and there’s still no cream, and so it still doesn’t make very much sense. So I figured I’d call the experts and find out what the truth is.
Oh, goodness. Yeah, the whole idea that we’ve got a drink called egg cream that doesn’t have eggs and creams is so delicious, so to speak, that I can’t resist it. It’s just one of those really delightful foodie language things. You’re like, what are humans even doing naming their things? Like, who even is in charge of naming food?
But probably what happened was, it isn’t from the Yiddish, but probably it’s, originally there was egg, and originally there was cream. There have been many drinks that have gone by the name of egg creams, including drinks where they whip up the whites of the egg into a really nice froth, and you might add some flavoring, some sweetness to that. You know, might have heard of an egg phosphate or an egg lemonade. Sometimes they had eggs. Sometimes they didn’t.
And so I suspect what’s happened here is the name kept going long after the ingredients changed. That’s the prevailing theory among food researchers anyway, because you will get things like even an egg-based shampoo at one time was called egg cream. You will see ads for it where people are saying my egg cream is the best for your hair. And they’re trying to get you to buy it.
Wow. You know, that’s fascinating because having a froth on it was part of the art of making an egg cream. You had to stir it up, and you generally put the chocolate syrup into the milk first, and then you added the seltzer, and you got this nice froth on it.
So that takes it right back to those old drinks.
Yeah, it really does.
And if you’ve ever had any kind of those really finicky and difficult-to-make desserts that involve whipping up egg whites, not only are they amazing to look at, but so much else can be added to them, like citrus or what have you, to add flavor.
So I could totally see an earlier version with actual eggs in it.
Well, thank you so much for that answer. I had no idea that it might be related to drinks and products that actually had eggs and cream in them.
Yeah, that’s the most likely answer.
Carl, thank you so much for sharing your memories and your stories with us. We really appreciate it.
It’s my pleasure.
Thank you so much for talking with me. It’s a delight, and I absolutely love the show.
Oh, thank you very much.
Thanks so much, Carl.
Take care. Bye-bye.
