Put an Egg In It
A pair of summery gin fizzes, brought to life with egg white.
Everyone loves a cocktail with an egg in it. And that’s been true for pretty much as long as cocktails-as-we-know-them have existed.
The founding fathers of what we now call classic cocktails knew the power of eggs.
Eggs were abundant in Jerry Thomas’ world-changing mid-1800s cocktail manual Bartenders Guide, appearing in numerous nogs and flips. Eggs — whole or whites — would become the signature ingredients in several of late 1800s barkeep Harry Johnson’s most famous concoctions.
You can still find eggs in any number of cocktails today. And, thanks to the culture of cocktail innovation and the widespread availability of many once-novel ingredients, you can also find drinks made with egg white substitutes, like aquafaba, which is just the leftover liquid associated with chickpeas.
Eggs don’t change the flavor of a drink, but they radically alter the texture. They make cocktails more frothy, more fizzy, and more fluffy. If you’ve visited a bar and had a cocktail with a half-inch thick white foamy top, it had an egg — or something egg-like — in it.
Eggy cocktails are showy. Eggs add visual interest and a sense of fussy drama to cocktail, inflating drinks beyond their humble liquid bases, especially in combination with soda water.
Even after more than 150 years, the use of an egg gives a cocktail a kind of elevated novelty. When you are served an egg cocktail at a bar, it’s almost always meant to impress you, to say, this is the sort of cocktail you can’t make at home.
Except, of course, that you can. Yes, it takes a little bit of effort. There’s some cracking and separating and extra shaking. And if you’re serving multiple egg-white drinks throughout the evening, you might want to prepare the egg component in advance so you don’t have to crack and separate eggs all night.
But the results are worth it. Because, well, everybody loves a cocktail with an egg in it.
In the past, we’ve looked at egg drinks that feel most at home during the winter, like eggnog1 or flips, or the fall, like whiskey sours. But this week, I want to highlight a pair of simple, timeless egg cocktails that are great for warmer weather.
This week’s drinks are the Silver Fizz and the Royal Fizz, both of which elevate the basic gin sour template — gin, lemon, sugar syrup or other sweetener — with the addition of soda water and egg or egg white. Both drinks are bubbly, frothy, and a little bit decadent.
Alright, maybe more than a little bit.
The good news is that with a little bit of prep and planning, you can put one together in just a few minutes.
The Collins Connection
Last summer, we looked at the Gin Collins and a universal template for making Collins-style drinks. The Collins, of course, is functionally just a sour with the addition of soda water, served over ice.
Both of this week’s drinks resemble the Collins, and like the Universal Collins we looked at, they can be template-ized.
But there are also some key differences.