The iconic New York Jewish drink, the egg cream, doesn’t have egg in it. Come to think of it, it doesn’t have cream in it, either. It’s just whole milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer, which, admittedly, sounds really gross—but I’m a recent convert. Not to Judaism (that's already covered), but to egg creams.
It happened during an afternoon with Jewish icon Phil Rosenthal, the guy from Netflix’sSomebody Feed Phil, on which he’s introduced folks across the world to the magic of the egg cream. “This is the thing I know how to do,” Phil tells me. “I did this for ballerinas in Central Park. Tracy Morgan had his first egg cream with me. We did an episode in Tokyo, and it was one of my favorite things we’ve ever done—I made egg creams for a family at their eel restaurant. One of my favorite things in my life was seeing them taste that for the first time.”
What's the deal with the name, though? "There are origin stories of it, that it was a German-Jewish creation, over a hundred years ago, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Because it has a frothiness to it, you could really fool people with the name. It sounds great—and it is great—but it's not really what it sounds like. Which, to me, is very New York."
At this point in our conversation, it was clear that Rosenthal wanted to make me an egg cream. So I scurried down to the Epicurious test kitchen, grabbed a loose can of seltzer, some whole milk, and a bottle ofFox’s U-bet chocolate syrupthat was, miraculously, sitting there in walk-in fridge. When I delivered the ingredients to Phil, he got very serious about his craft.
“Fill the glass up a quarter of the way with whole milk, then another quarter with the syrup,” he tells me. “A lot of people leave too much at the bottom. Stir it well.”
Next comes the seltzer. “This is the real trick," Rosenthal says. "You keep stirring as you pour it in.” And so he does exactly that, and suddenly, the magic happens. The head on it is so frothy, and it comes out of nowhere—even Phil’s entourage started ooh-ing and ahh-ing. “How beautiful, right? Everyone says ‘ooh.’ You can use a straw, but I think the foaminess against your lips is better.”
I take a sip. And it’s a little sour from the seltzer, ultra-creamy from the milk, and, most surprisingly, not cloyingly sweet. It has, for me, the same appeal as drinking acold brew with sparkling water, or a coffee tonic—it’s as complex as a fancy cocktail hopes to be. “It sounds like a rich, beautiful dessert, but it’s the cheapest thing in the world,” Phil rightfully points out. “It’s the greatest trick.”
As a health-minded person, an egg cream is never going to be the first thing I reach for when I feel like a snack. But, boy, an ice-cold egg cream on a hot day, kicking back at a cookout maybe, would be an absolute dream. Oh, and it’s a cool party trick, and a nice way to flaunt a little Jewish culture around your gentile friends.
How had I never experienced this before? After I guzzle down my egg cream and slam the empty highball glass down on the table, Rosenthal wonders the same thing. “Now you’ve got to go home, slap your parents, and ask them: Where was this my whole life?”
