You walk into a candy store on Avenue B and you say egg cream and the man behind the counter does not ask you what flavor. He already knows. Chocolate. There is no other flavor. There are people who order vanilla egg creams and those people are wrong. The egg cream has no egg and no cream and nobody knows why it is called an egg cream and nobody cares. You do not question the name. You drink it.

The recipe is three things. Milk. Seltzer. Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup. That is it. Three ingredients and a spoon and the sound of the spoon hitting the glass is the overture. The man pours the milk first. Cold. Then the syrup. Then the seltzer from the tap and he stirs it fast and the foam rises up like a crown and if the foam is right the egg cream is right and if the foam is wrong you are in the wrong candy store.

You cannot make an egg cream at home. You can try. You can buy the milk and the syrup and the seltzer and you can stir it in your kitchen and it will taste like a drink that is trying to be an egg cream and failing. The egg cream needs the counter. The egg cream needs the man. The egg cream needs the glass that has been washed ten thousand times and the spoon that has stirred ten thousand egg creams and the seltzer tap that only exists in candy stores that do not exist anymore.

Every candy store on the Lower East Side had an egg cream. Gem Spa on Second Avenue and St. Marks Place. That was the embassy. Every punk rocker and every poet and every kid cutting school stood on that corner drinking an egg cream that cost thirty-five cents. Gem Spa closed in twenty twenty. The pandemic killed it. Forty years of punk rock could not kill Gem Spa but a virus did. The corner is still there. The egg cream is not.

They sell egg creams in restaurants now. Restaurants that charge twelve dollars for an egg cream that used to cost a quarter. The waiter brings it on a tray and it comes in a fancy glass and there is no foam because the waiter does not know how to make the foam because the waiter did not grow up behind a candy store counter stirring ten thousand egg creams. You cannot charge twelve dollars for an egg cream. An egg cream is a quarter. An egg cream is thirty-five cents. An egg cream is the cheapest thing in the city that makes you feel like the richest person on the block.