The History Of NYC's Whimsical Egg Cream Soda

The New York City food scene is globally-renowned. Its pizza, bagels, pastrami, and dirty water hot dogs are iconic, beloved by locals and tourists alike. But there is one New York specialty that is virtually unknown outside of the city, yet which many locals would claim as NYC's signature drink. The egg cream, or egg cream soda (not to be confused with cream soda) is almost exclusively found in New York, and even there, its availability is limited. While our modern beverages of choice come in bottles and cans, the egg cream still lives in that most nostalgic of establishments: the soda fountain. It is, in essence, a drinkable piece of New York history.

If you don't already know what an egg cream is, don't look to its name for information. Bizarrely, this drink contains no eggs, nor a single drop of cream. The three ingredients that make an egg cream are milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer water, so it's essentially a chocolate milk soda. Though they seem simple at first, these ingredients are bound to strict standards, which are practically law in the city of New York. You may never use seltzer from a bottle or can, only from a soda gun, or better yet, one of those old-timey soda siphons, and the syrup must be Fox's U-Bet, a Brooklyn specialty. The final key is a foamy head on top, which might have something to do with the drink's confusing name.

Some have speculated that the egg cream's name comes from the fact that its frothy head resembles whipped egg whites, but there's no way to confirm this. The fact of the matter is, nobody knows for certain where the name came from, or the drink itself for that matter. One widespread theory says that it was invented in the 1880s, when Yiddish theater star Boris Thomashevky walked into a soda fountain on the Lower East Side and requested a "chocolat et crème," the name of a drink he once sampled in Paris. How that request produced the egg cream is unclear, and the tale never mentions the name of the soda jerk who evidently invented it, but it does provide a partial explanation for the name.

The most common version of events credits the invention of the egg cream to a candy shop proprietor named Louis Auster, who supposedly made it by mistake (it's unclear what he was actually trying to make) sometime in the 1890s or early 1900s. It became so popular that Auster reportedly sold as many as 3,000 egg creams per day. Auster was highly secretive when it came to his egg cream recipe, particularly the chocolate syrup he used. It isn't even clear if he sourced it or made it himself. However, in 1903, Fox's U-Bet started business in Brooklyn, and became the standard syrup for all who wanted to mimic Auster's hit creation.

The egg cream is particularly associated with the city's large Jewish community. This goes back to the very beginning of egg creams, as reflected in the aforementioned origin story. Both Louis Auster and Boris Thomashevsky were Jewish immigrants, and its reported birthplace, the Lower East Side, is a historic Jewish neighborhood. Some have even theorized that the egg cream's name is an Americanized version of the Yiddish phrase echt keem, which means "pure sweetness".

The Jewish roots of egg creams go even deeper. Fox's U-Bet Syrup was created by Herman Fox, a Jewish Brooklynite who made the first batch in his tenement home. Seltzer water also has deep ties to the Jewish community. German Jews were among the first to bottle seltzer from naturally carbonated springs in the town of Neiderseltsers (from which seltzer gets its name). After becoming a staple for European Jews, immigrants brought their thirst for seltzer to America and built a massive industry off the product.

This all laid the grounds for egg creams to thrive in the Lower East Side and other Jewish enclaves, where they remain most popular to this day. The drink has been celebrated by Jewish celebrities like director Mel Brooks and Velvet Underground Frontman Lou Reed, who paid homage to it in a song called "egg cream". Even as soda fountains drift into the past, this devoted community is sure to keep the egg cream alive.