Egg Cream

The egg cream, a seemingly simple beverage, is produced from only three ingredients—milk, seltzer, and chocolate syrup—and contains neither eggs nor cream. While folklore, more so than fact, defines the egg cream’s history, the origin and popularity of the drink indisputably belong to New York City. The egg cream, originally a drink associated with Eastern European Jewish immigrants, quickly became a beverage so linked to New York that it serves as one of the city’s most recognizable icons. Almost exclusive to soda fountains and ice cream parlors, this New York specialty has been around since the 1920s, with popularity surging from the 1930s to the 1950s and then waning during the 1960s and 1970s, as soda fountains and ice cream parlors disappeared.