Black Adam: Dark Age #6 (2008)
Written by Peter Tomasi
Artwork by Doug Mahnke
Inks by Christian Alamy & Rodney Ramos, Colors by Nathan Eyring
Chef’s Note: I can’t decide here if Teth Adam is a genius-level detective or if Billy simply thought himself more clever than he really was when choosing the new secret password?
It feels like he could have added a few numbers in there, a couple special characters maybe, but instead decided to just go with the name of his favorite pet or the street he grew up on?
That said, I very much appreciate the quick & articulate lesson the soda jerk offers on the proper preparation of a Chocolate Egg Cream.
In the 2018 documentary, “Egg Cream,” food historian Andrew Coe describes egg creams as a cheap copy of the soda fountain drinks from the fancier neighborhoods of New York. The drink, said Coe, “gave people a sense that they were having a fancy, uptown kind of drink for a very downtown kind of price.” Even the name — egg cream — Coe explains, sounds rich. But it’s also misleading; the standard egg cream has no egg and no cream.
Some say the name is a bastardization of the Yiddish word “echt” which means genuine or real. Grogan, of Juliana’s Pizza, heard that when Louis Auster was making the drinks he would, “call to his staff and ask them to bring up more of the [grade] ‘A’ cream which, given New York accents, morphed over time to ‘egg cream’.” Brooklyn Farmacy’s Freeman believes the original egg cream really was made with egg. In the ‘20s, he said, refrigeration was bad. Soda jerks would whip egg whites and dollop them on top of the chocolate soda. In so doing, they could turn a 2-cent chocolate soda into a 5-cent egg cream. Only later, he believes, was egg replaced by milk when good refrigeration became more widespread.
Chef’s Note: Happy National Egg Cream Day!