Chocolate Egg Cream

For me, Brooklyn was a time as well as a place. The Brooklyn I knew, growing up, was Pee Wee and Jackie, Gil Hodges and the Duke, corned beef or pastrami on rye, reubens, Nova and sturgeon from a host of appetizing stores, cheese blintzes, knishes, Blackout cakes from Ebbinger's, French baked delights from Sutter's, fresh fish caught at Sheepshead Bay, gaslight dinners at Gage and Tolner, seafood at Lundy's, hot dogs at Nathan's, the best Italian and chinese food, and chocolate egg creams. Many of these no longer exist. The Dodgers are gone; the large Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrant populations are gone. A new multiracial middle class is emerging and gentrified areas are giving the borough a rebirth with new restaurants galore. But the old ethnic Brooklyn and its wonderful tastes are gone. in the following posts, I will show some of the dishes and drinks that were popular in Brooklyn and New York City in general in the fifty's and sixty's of my youth.

The Chocolate Egg Cream was a fixture in every corner luncheonette. This fizzy chocolate drink has no eggs and no cream, just milk, seltzer and Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup. No other chocolate syrup works here. I recently bought Egg creams in a shop in Manhattan and a shop in Pittsboro, NC. They tried, but their effors failed because they did not use Fox's U-Bet. Here's how to make an great Egg Cream:

2 to 3 ounces Fox's U-Bet (Available in many supermarkets)
4 ounces very cold milk
Cold seltzer (great from a soda fountain, can also work from a soda bottle.)

1. Pour about 1 inch of chocolate syrup in a tall soda glass
2. Stir in the milk
3. Tilt the glass and squirt in seltzer aimed at a long handled spoon. This willl cause a white foam on top. Mix everything with the spoon and drink immediately.