Phoebe's KitchenOn exhibit through October 30, 2011, the New York’s Good Eats! Our Fabulous Foods is happening at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, NY.
Many of these foods from Buffalo Wings to Pie a la Mode to Jell-o were invented in New York State.
Our latest cookbook, the Taste and Tales of New York, highlights many of these foods. Below is the tale about one of New York's famous drinks.
What is an Egg Cream?
This is definitely a Brooklyn drink and it does not contain either eggs or cream. I can remember from my days as a buyer in New York that after a busy day in the market our resident buyer Joe would suggest we all go for an egg cream. Initially I thought he meant a chocolate egg cream, but I learned that he meant the following drink. There are a couple of versions of how the egg cream came to be. The first was that a Yiddish actor had a drink called chocolate et creme, in Paris, France, and wanted one made here. A more likely tale is that in the early 1900s candy shop owner Louis Auster, owner of Austers, invented the drink and sold hundreds a day until the store closed.
