Composed of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer, it’s a famous anomaly that the classic New York egg cream contains no actual eggs. Vietnamese egg soda (Soda Sữa Hột Gà), on the other hand, is packed with yolky goodness, balanced out with the heavy tang of sweetened condensed milk and the fizzy snap of seltzer, the kind of concoction that’s almost a meal in itself. As served at Com Tam Ninh Kieu, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, it pairs well with the sharp flavors of the restaurant’s namesake dish, which makes use of ‘broken rice’, the irregular toss-offs of the rice world, which have long since been rediscovered as an ideal flavor vehicle. Served with all the trimmings at Com Tam, the once-neglected rice is accompanied by two fried eggs, a slab of pork chop and a shrimp cake, a sort of Indochinese spin on a lumberjack breakfast. Breaking the cardinal rule of carbonated beverages, I took the remainder of my soda home, where it was reconstituted in this fantastic Silver Gulch pint glass, with a bit more seltzer added to cut down the egginess, nudging the texture out of full-bodied nog territory. As for the history, the origins of the Sữa Hột Gà seem to be even more mysterious than that of the egg cream itself. The classic New York beverage was apparently stumbled upon in the 1890s by Brooklyn candy store proprietor Louis Auster, although as with any dish or beverage attributed to a single creator, the truth is likely a bit more complicated. There’s also no firm accounting for the origin of the name, although theories abound, most of them involving local slang and corrupted Yiddish derivations. Auster never gave up the details of his recipe, so the real New York Egg Cream, and the story of its creation, definitively died with him. The drink lives on in its 1920s fad incarnation, which ups the NYC heritage ties by using Brooklyn-made Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup. Still a fixture of old-fashioned diners and soda fountains all over the borough, it’s a world away from this similar, but apparently unrelated, mixture served up in the distant reaches of the Bronx.
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