“Where’s the egg?” the confused woman asked me as I stood by a booth that had all the ingredients needed to make a classic egg cream.
“There is no egg.”
“You’re telling me they never put an egg in it?”
“Never.”
“Do they add cream?”
“Never.”
Giving me a quizzical eye, the woman threw caution to the wind. “OK, guess I’ll have an eggless, creamless egg cream.”

The event was the annual Borscht Belt Festival, presented by the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum in Ellenville, with a mission to preserve the legacy of that historic resort era. The weekend festival provided exhibits, historical talks and standup comedy reminiscent of the classic Catskills era. And of course, there was food.

The fest offered an epicurean delight of Jewish cuisine, with tastes and smells that reminded many of their Catskill and city deli delights. Amidst the corned beef and pastrami, pickles and perogies, bagels and babka and multiple varieties of knishes, folks could wash it all down with beer, wine and other beverage options. Or, like me, line up at the busy Brooklyn Seltzer Boys tent and wet their whistle with the most iconic carbonated concoction ever to grace the soda fountains of old New York.
The egg cream.

That quenching drink was as much a part of the dietary delicacy of my Brooklyn youth as a Nathan’s hot dog, a pizza slice from Bella Donna on Kings Highway and a salty pretzel with mustard at the luncheonette off Avenue J and Nostrand.

It’s where I honed my libation skills watching soda jerks expertly combine the three ingredients - Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup, milk and spritzes of seltzer - in just the right sequence, stirring using just the right force at just the right angle to produce the perfect white head froth guaranteed to quench the greatest of thirsts.
Rest assured, the Brooklyn Boys did it right, spritzing seltzer from old-fashioned blue siphon bottles.

And who before them knew how to make such a treat?
“The annals of time have obscured the inventor and the rational and philosophical underpinnings of the drink’s name,” writes New York Cookbook author Molly O’Neill. One theory, explains Joy Fox in the “History of the egg cream soda,” is that in the 1880s, Yiddish theater pioneer Boris Thomashevsky asked a New York City soda fountain to reproduce a drink he had discovered in Paris, but the French chocolat et crème got lost in translation. Others say the name is an Americanization of echt keem, Yiddish for “pure sweetness,” and some suggest it’s simply Brooklynese for “a cream.”

The most common story, explains Fox, is that in the 1890s, candy shop owner Louis Auster concocted the drink by accident. It’s said he sold thousands a day. But when Auster refused to sell the rights to the drink to an ice cream chain, a company executive called him an anti-Semitic slur, and he vowed to take the formula to his grave. Without Auster’s special syrup, other soda fountains relied on the H. Fox & Company’s Brooklyn original: Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup, containing water, sugar, corn sweeteners, cocoa and some “secret things.”

Today you can buy it already bottled. That just seems wrong.
As I watched Brooklyn Seltzer Boys create the egg cream for this woman, I explained the key to quality is to have the perfect proportion of syrup to milk to seltzer. And yes, something is lost when the seltzer is poured instead of spritzed. Even then, without the vigorous wrist action of spoon to glass, using the correct angle and speed, you could end up with just another drink.

She sipped and smiled.