A question for the folks on this site: In what year and at what bar did you first encounter a Whiskey Sour made with an egg white?
1 Like
Not a Whiskey Sour, but egg white Sours in 2007 at Eastern Standard (Boston) and soon after at Green Street (Cambridge, MA).
2 Likes
I honestly canât remember where I first encountered an egg-white Whiskey Sour, because Whiskey Sours were not drinks you ordered at the new cocktail bars in the aughts in early 2010s. You ordered more arcane classic cocktails, or original cocktails.
1 Like
The closest was in 2007 with the Pisco Sour which was created by an American bartender in South America riffing on the Whiskey Sour he wanted to make but using the local spirits and citrus.
My first Whiskey Sour was 1997 but there was no citrus or egg white (sour mix!). My first real citrus cocktail (other than OJ from a carton) was late 1998 or early 1999 at the B-Side in Cambridge, MA: a Lemon Drop! I was playing wingman to my friend who was meeting a girl who lived around the corner. We didnât even have the menu in front of us when they came to take an order, so when she said âIâll have a Lemon Drop!â in fright I replied âIâll have one too.â Although the next time I was in there a few years later (perhaps 2007), I had a Fancy Free!
2 Likes
In Philadelphia, mine was a house party crowd. Bars and clubs were for middling types who had to cast about for friends and purchase their fun. Liquid Intelligence opened our eyes beyond Yuenglingâeven slumming done with tongue in cheek has an expiration date. The first cocktail bars I encountered were supplementary to the learning I was doing online and in stores. I was definitely doing egg white cocktails at home before I ever saw them in the wild. I couldnât tell you which onesâI rarely did the same one twice. I started grad school in the suburbs in 2015, and planned a pub crawl with a couple friends to familiarize myself with the territory. I decided I would drink a whiskey sour at every stop. I figured it was a bellwether I could have made in ambitious and humble establishments. I didnât encounter any eggs.
But to answer your question, it probably would have been circa 2015 at the Ranstead Room, or else Hop Sing Laundromat.
1 Like
In Europe, the question would be: when did you first encounter a Whisky Sour without egg white?
Itâs my understanding that sours have had egg whites as a standard for decades here. In fact, I was shocked to learn in 2012/2013 that relatively experienced but still young Parisian bartenders (letâs say 35 to 45 then) couldnât imagine making a Margarita or a Daiquiri without a drop of egg white, in fear that their client would return it.
2 Likes
From our first day in 2005, we prepared a daily house sour mix at Peacock Alley that included egg whites (on a side note, we whipped the egg whites separately then folded them into the âlemonadeâ).
It was more of a way to contend with the volume, than anything else.
2 Likes
The DeGroff and Petraske âschoolsâ have never been afraid to employ egg whites in particular drinks, but Iâve also never thought of them as âegg white happyâ or prone to add egg whites by default. Rather, theyâd only add egg white if it was essential to the drink. For example, Degroff didnât even bother with the drink in Craft, but acknowledges the egg white as optional in Essential Cocktail.
I mainly associate the whiskey-sour-with-egg-white with old school (pre-Renaissance) bars, and I recall those were generally using a squirt of one of those artificial foamers rather than actual egg white.
Perhaps thereâs a regional aspect to egg whites, and New York City is on the sparing side of the spectrum?
1 Like
Interesting. That certainly hasnât been the case in the U.S. until recently.
But where did DeGroff and Petraske get that idea? What was the specific inspiration from the past that sparked them?
And youâre right. Most of the early books of the cocktail revival didnât even bother with the Whiskey Sour. Itâs not in the PDT book, or Sashaâs book.
The egg white + citrus combo in drinks goes back at least to Punch Ă la Romaine and appears in early fizzes and sours from the 19th Century, so nothing new there. However, there are plenty of historical recipes for sours both with and without egg white to draw from.
We gotta keep in mind, though, that while some folks like Dale owned collections of old bar books by the early 2000s, those collections were much less comprehensive than they later became, and the level of assimilation was much lower than today. We bandied about a lot of ideas that later turned out to be misconceptions (@Splificator emerged thereabouts as the prime myth-puncturer).
My suspicion is that the drop in egg white use within the DeGroff and Petraske is related to the drop in sour mix use, which is really less about historical authenticity than about process and taste. They were stripping drinks back to essentials and questioning all assumptions: what is essential and how do we make the drink the best it can be? Egg whites didnât necessarily make drinks better. Artificial foaming agents definitely did not. (Egg whites are also a pain in the ass and carry health risks, so they carry built-in disincentives.)
My recollection is that artificial foaming agents were de rigueur in an awful lot of American bars by the time I was really drinking (1990s). I even recall being served Manhattans (!) with foamy tops. I assume this practice dates back to the fern bar era, but I may be mistaken.
My sense is the cocktail revivalâs rediscovery of raw egg happened mostly within flips, and gin cocktailsâfizzes, clovers. I agree with Martin that a whiskey sour with [foamer] occupied a distinctly different set of associations, and it wasnât until the revival was firmly established that it could risk reconciling with those passĂ© associations. But now, outside of those metropolitan trailblazing outposts of âso damn weird,â most cocktail menus display a disorienting detente of names from the dark eighties, the classical revival, and the tweener food magazine days. Thatâs the cruel irony of history, where yesterdayâs warring factions appear to be bedfellows from the distance of time.
1 Like
Back in the '80s I used to like to save my pennies and every once in a while go to a fancy barâthe Oak Bar at the Plaza in New York, Harryâs Bar (a branch of the Venice one) in Century City, LAâand have a couple of classy cocktails. My normal drink was Gibsons, so Iâd try to branch out into the other retro drinks on offer. Planterâs Punches, Fizzes, Whiskey Sours (I had the paperback of James Beardâs version of P.G. Duffyâs book, which served as a checklist). Joints like these always had a few retro drinks, to keep the oldsters happy. At least their sour mix would have been house-made, with real egg white. I also would occasionally order a fancy drink from the placemat some diners used, with stock 4-color photos of the cocktails they supposedly made. That Whiskey Sour Iâm sure used the foaming agent, which goes pretty far back (here it is in 1968).
Iâll also second what François says, but for Italy. In the 1980s every Italian city of any size had at least one Bar Americano making what to us were retro drinks, and the sours were always foamy.
I think Sashaâs signature drink in the early days of M&H was his Silver Rye Fizz, which you could always get without the fizz.
2 Likes
Re Europe, the egg white in sours has often been traced back to the 1920s.
Hereâs Vermeire on this:
Back when I was researching Vermeireâs life, I remember raising this up with @Splificator, and, of course, he did have earlier mentions of the practice.
But it does seem to have been much more relevant in Europe. Or rather it remained part of the repertoire, as the Daiquiri aberration I mentioned previously seems to show.
3 Likes
I wouldnât say aberration so much as variation. It definitely goes back: Patsy McDonough had the Frosted Sour (whiskey-based) back in 1883. Schmidt in the 1890s had a handful of egg-white sours, but I donât recall a whiskey one. His Delicious Sour, which got some play at the time, was applejack- and peach brandy-based. Tim Daly in 1903 had an egg white Irish Whiskey version, and John Applegreenâs 1913 Heidelberg Sour was based on whiskey with a dash of rum.
But those were the good bars. The shit ones apparently used, instead of lemon juice, a mix of acetic acid, syrup and egg white, which was probably originally there to give drinks the slight foaminess that real lemon juice does. Hereâs a Philadelphia paper from 1904; read down to the bottom:
The European bars seem to have run these practices together, using a bottled mix, but with both fresh juice and the egg white. I suspect American bars did that, too (I recall seeing it), but I donât have a reference handy.
2 Likes
I guess my question is what made a whole egg white (not a foaming agent or a sour mix with a bit of egg white in it) in Whiskey Sours the de facto recipe at most modern cocktails bars in the last 20 years in the United States. Who led the way? What book were they using as their guide? I recently polls 10 important cocktails bars from across the name about their Whiskey Sour recipe. All but one use an egg white. Thereâs usually a patient zero in these situations, a pied piper.
I wonder what the history of public consciousness of âhealth risksâ of raw eggs is, and how it might intersect with these histories.
In places and times (like where I live now) bars are required to provide customers with notices like â*Consuming raw ⊠eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness.â
Has the rise of those warnings (or the apprehensions they reflect) reduced the use of egg whites in drinks? (Or have they boosted the âliving on the edgeâ appeal for some drinkers?!)
Given the ubiquity of raw egg and raw fish in dining, I am skeptical these now-common warnings are much of a factor. (Of course, some people avoid such foods, but they donât seem to be slowing down the restaurants.)
The biggest inherent strikes against egg whitesâI thinkâare that they are a practical hassle, and the risk of wet dog smell.
If the egg white whiskey sour is having a momentâtodayâI bet it has nothing to do with a book.
Frechetteâs Punch article from September makes the same observation as you: egg white is nearly standard, decorated with bitters, as per the Pisco Sour. They also note that nobody knows when/how this came to be.
I would hypothesize this fashion is simply an easily-imitated way to take a simple drink and make it fancier. Once you know how to make a Pisco Sour, you can make a similar Whiskey Sour; if you like the Pisco Sour, youâll probably enjoy a similarly creamy/mild Whiskey Sour. (My wife would be on board.)
3 Likes
If it did have something to do with a book, my money would be on Death & Coâs first one. Egg white, dry-shake, strain into rocks glass with large lump of ice. Check, check, check for the Whiskey Sours I see out in the wild, and the strain-over-a-large-rock, which is definitely not traditional, is a solid tell. Plus that book sold an Imperial buttload of copies.
The other place Iâd look is Dave Arnoldâs Liquid Intelligence. Heâs another egg-white-my-Sour person, and his book has sold almost as much as the D&C one.
3 Likes
I went to an Irish whiskey event last night that listed egg white as an ingredient on the menu yet they were using Feeâs Foamer. It was a great Irish whiskey but the distiller got hosted in a bar that you wouldnât order anything other than the basics from. The foam subsided in appearance, but there was no change in mouthfeel or smoothness.
The farewell drink was a âSazeracâ that had citrus and Aperol in it, and when the bar team left the absinthe out, not even sure how they can justify murdering that classic (I have a photo of the menu that I sent to my friend who reps another Irish whiskey to show what his competition was doing).
2 Likes