Chocolate egg cream
My father grew up near Yankee Stadium, and my mother in Crown Heights, so I never acquired a taste for egg creams, I inherited one. For the unfamiliar, an egg cream is a simple combination of chocolate syrup, milk, and seltzer, invented by Louis Auster, a Brooklyn Jew and candy-store owner. In the summers as a teenager, I would regularly go out of my way to stop at Gem Spa, the East Village bodega that has quietly become legendary for its egg creams, to order one.
Now if you ask any Jew, New Yorker, or Lou Reed fan what the most important part of an egg cream is, you will invariably hear “U-Bet.” Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup is the key to the classic egg cream’s flavor, and any gonif who would try to pass off an egg cream with Hershey’s or Nestle would be laughed out of the deli. Once, alone and desperate, I made one with Bosco, but it was a dark time in my life I’d prefer to forget.
U-Bet
An egg cream made with U-Bet syrup tastes creamy, light, and refreshing all at once, and is a marvel of New York Jewish Cuisine, but it is also an example of how unsustainability can be writ into the fabric of the deli. U-Bet, for all it’s New York charm and nostalgia, is made from factory-farmed corn syrup, cocoa produced and purchased without concern for the farmers or communities around them, dry milk from cows tied up in stalls and treated with hormones.
When David Sax brought up egg creams at our lunch, I asked him if one could make them sustainably and from scratch, with well-sourced cocoa and milk. He liked the idea and said he’d seen it tried at Kenny and Zuke’s in Portland, OR (of all places!) with Dagoba chocolate, but that the clientele there were skeptical towards the drink when it was introduced. But now? “They always complain, until they taste it.”
DAVID BERNSTEIN - Writer, food lover, kitchen experimenter, lefty cynic.
A couple of points about U-Bet syrup.
First, as long as U-Bet is in business they can be pressured to clean up their act. As a 62-year-old I can say with reasonable assurance that the U-Bet of the fifties was made with cane sugar, not corn syrup and the milk came from upstate New York cows roaming free on pristine pastureland. As for the exploitation of the cocoa workers, well, blame the South American oligarchs and their CIA-trained death squads for that!
Second, U-Bet was never the best quality syrup on the market. Boxer’s Pharmacy, on West 238th St. and Greystone Ave., in the Bronx, used Hershey’s and made a superior egg cream, although I will admit that my family used U-Bet when making egg creams at home. It was delivered along with each case of squirt-bottle seltzer that was placed on our doorstep, right next to the wire-frame box from the milkman.
Zingerman’s is a midwestern outfit, so their customers haven’t been educated about egg creams at all, much less sustainable ones.
By the way, too few people give credit to the vessel in which the egg cream is made. To yield the best bubbles, it should be a large Coca Cola glass, the kind that flares at the top. Too many of the few establishments that still make egg creams try to get away with paper or styrofoam cups or straight-sided glasses.
Richard, I do agree that Fox’s can probably change their act, and might be one of the few companies that could be affected by smaller-scale action, since they aren’t a huge company and I imagine a lot of their business comes from New York deli lovers. There’s certainly a lot of blame to be thrown around for the unfortunate externalities that agribusiness causes, but rather than decide who’s to blame, we’re trying to figure out where to go from here. I’d love to know more about U-Bet’s history, though, especially how methods have changed and what they were like originally.
Frankly, though, I’m shocked that your favorite egg cream was a Hershey’s! I’ll have to consult my father about Boxer’s; he’s my authority on all things Bronx.
Would a kosher deli serve egg creams? We went to the “candy store.” It had stools and a counter, seltzer and U-Bet on tap. Yeah, U-Bet was the ticket.
I wait till the Kosher-for-Passover U-Bet hits the shelves and then I stock up. It’s made with sugar.