The first dress I ever peeked down belonged to a girl named Francine. We were both about 10 at the time, and we only spent time together because my mother was trying to fix us up.

Mom would slip me a couple of dimes every now and then with instructions to ask Francine out for an egg cream. Which I did.

Only because I was crazy about egg creams.

I was not crazy about Francine. It was nothing personal. I was 10 and she was a girl, that’s all. I’m sure she was in it for the egg creams, too.

If you watched television in the 50s you know that Ricky and David Nelson, Wally and the Beaver, all the heartthrobs of the day, made whoopee over ice cream sodas or milk shakes. No one on television ever stared longingly into a date’s eyes with an egg cream between them.

You had to be a certain kind of person to do that.

New York, mostly Jewish, and from low- or middle-class immigrant roots. If you fell into that category, however, egg creams were as much the social lubricant as cigarettes and coffee.

Egg creams were a product of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, known as home to tenement buildings and the low- and middle-class families (mostly immigrant) who lived in them.

While the uptown elite sipped their fancy ice cream sodas and malted milk shakes in soda fountains with marble counters, residents of this slice of Manhattan made do with candy stores and the 2-cent plain—an unadorned glass of seltzer.

Exactly when and how the egg cream came into existence is a mystery which, I’m sure, did nothing to hurt its appeal. There are at least three competing origin stories but they all have two things in common: the purpose of the drink was to allow the lower classes to enjoy a “fancy” drink so they could feel as special as their (very, very distant) uptown cousins; and, there is not, and never was, any egg or cream in an egg cream.

The classic egg cream—no, not classic, proper—is constructed from milk, Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, and New York City seltzer drawn from a tap. Milk was the least critical ingredient, but the other two were crucial.

U-Bet had a distinctive flavor (it contained powered milk) that wasn’t matched by inferior syrups (and certainly not any that came from a jar, such as Bosco).

The New York City seltzer, made with New York City water, had to be injected into the drink with just the right force to create a foamy head of microbubbles.

For a nickel and the few minutes it took to gulp one down (sipping an egg cream was pretentious), you didn’t hear mothers leaning out of windows nagging their kids to get out of the street.

You didn’t think how you were a couple of ice cream scoops or tablespoons of malt, short of an expensive drink. Instead, you were transported to the land of mink coats and marble soda fountain counters.

Egg creams were chicken soup for the soul, long before a couple of authors thought that phrase would sell books.

As Lower East Side residents dispersed through the city so did egg creams. Brooklynites laid claim to them. Bronxites snickered, knowing they had the best egg creams in the city.

And then, like the sex you could never imagine your parents having, the legend-making days were over.

Incomes rose, putting ice cream sodas and milk shakes within reach. Popular, and easily available, bottled soft drinks meant fewer trips to soda fountains and candy stores. Those businesses never recovered.

The end of seltzer on tap pretty much marked the end of the egg cream as well. And, although it’s rarely spoken about, Fox changed the U-Bet formula, substituting corn syrup sweetener for sugar.

My heart tells me that was the final blow.

By the time Neil Armstrong was working on his first-man-on-the-moon speech, real egg creams existed mostly in the non-transferrable memories of older New Yorkers who had left the city on their way to the suburbs or a world more vertically distant.

According to the New York Times, egg creams are undergoing some sort of rennaisance, but many of the variations aimed at making the drink contemporary are vulgar at best. My days of gulping down an egg cream are over. As are those of staring wistfully into a young girl’s eyes.

Let alone looking down her dress.