Port Wine Flip, Port Shaken with a Whole Egg

Forty cents in Vienna

In the spring of 1873 Charles Carroll Fulton, an American visitor whose letters became Europe Viewed Through American Spectacles, described the American bars at the Vienna World’s Fair, run by waiters “most of them from New York.” Their price list of “American Mixed Drinks” ran from apple jack to whisky sour, with “port wine flip” and “egg flip” among them, at fifteen to forty cents a glass (about $4 to $11 in today’s money, by US consumer prices). Before the season opened, Fulton wrote, the bars had been expected to do poorly, since “a half-gallon of beer could be had for the cost of one of their fancy glasses.” Now they were “thronged with visitors.” Nine years after that list came the oldest port wine flip recipe yet found, No. 118 in Harry Johnson’s New and Improved Bartender’s Manual of 1882.

The British flips of the decades before were hot, ale or wine poured onto beaten eggs; Johnson’s is the cold American bar version, made in the shaker, from the bar books that The Bartenders Who Wrote Down the Classic Cocktails follows from 1862. O. H. Byron’s guide of 1884 prints its own Port Wine Flip on the same page as a Glasgow Flip of egg, lemon and ginger ale with no alcohol at all.