Food For Thought

First you need this:

Then you need this:

And lastly you need this:

And that's how you make an egg creme. And while it may sound simple, the making of a proper egg cream involves EXACTLY these ingredients. Substituting Hershey's Syrup for Fox's U-Bet is not an option, just as club soda from a can  instead of seltzer water from a bottle is not an option and skim milk instead of whole milk. You want to substitute fine, but don't call what you are making an egg cream.

Egg creams have attained an almost mythic reverence these days which I'm sure would have made the guys at the candy stores and soda fountains of it's native Brooklyn scratch their wife-beater t-shirts and mumble "Eh, whattaya gonna do?" As I said in an earlier post, when I was a kid and I did well at the doctor's office I got a pretzel, a coloring book, and an egg cream. Though I was born on Long Island, my parents were from Brooklyn and trusted only their old world doctor to care for the family. Thus said egg cream was dispensed from the window of a candy store near Troy Avenue in Brooklyn. Even then my father would grouse that the drink hadn't been dispensed into a dirty soda glass but rather into a disposable wax container and thus had lost some of it's soul. 

Because that's what an egg cream was, soul food. It meant love and family and care and tradition. In it's chocolate fizz was the tale of immigrants struggling to make their way in the new world of America, just as chitlins and mustard greens told of the struggle to break free of  slavery or even a cheesesteak spoke about wiseguys who scratched on the streets of Philly. Soul food is maybe the ultimate in oral history, each sip or bite a chance to renew relations with your past or to understand what others have gone through. It needs to be treated with respect. Don't put it in the museum that is fine dining. I don't care that the latest hot chef does "a superb take on a traditional dish". If I want ribs I want it served on a paper plate by a guy named Freddy who wipes his hands on the apron he's wearing before giving you change. I want my corned beef piled high between two slices of corn rye and just a little brown mustard as condiment. 

And where do you get this kind of experience? Sadly it's coming from fewer and fewer places. The real places, the ones with history as well as rib sauce on the walls are being plowed over. Now if they were being replaced with another groups soul food, well I could accept that. But they are not. They are being replaced by yet another Starbucks or even worse the ersatz soul food experience of an Olive Garden or a Chevy's. 

There is a movement in America these days of people trying to get back to fresh ingredients and to stop using canned or frozen convenience foods. How about we start a movement to go to restaurants that give us a real soul food experience.

In other words, if you want to call it an egg cream, then it better have those three ingredients listed above.