If this is your first time drinking an egg cream, you might not know what to expect. Basically, a New York Egg Cream tastes like malted chocolate. It’s a really light drink, which you might not expect because drinks with milk are usually heavy.

It sort of tastes like a fizzy milkshake, with an emphasis on the fizzy side. Or like cold club soda that has been flavored with chocolate syrup.

At this point, you’ve realized an egg cream is a funny name for this since there’s no cream or eggs in the drink. And you’re probably wondering why this is called an egg cream and not milky chocolate seltzer water.

According to imbebe magazine, there are a couple theories for the origin of the name, but no one knows the truth.

Theory 1 is that One theory is that Boris Thomashevsky, a Yiddish theater star, asked for a drink he had in Paris: a chocolat et crème. That’s hard to say, so the name didn’t translate over, and only the “crème” stuck.

Theory 2 is that the words “echt keem,” which mean “pure sweetness” in Yiddish were Americanized to be pronounced “egg cream.”

Theory 3 is that the real name is “a cream,” referring to the fact that it’s made with Grade A milk, but it’s said with such a heavy Brooklyn accent, so it sounds like, “egg cream” to the rest of America.

I can actually really see that. My uncle from Brooklyn pronounces the hard yet invisible r on the end of “soda,” so Brooklynese really is a dialect of its own.

Just to confuse things even more, Merriam-Webster says back in the late 1800’s, around the same time as the Boris Thomashevsky story, there were actually egg creams — drinks made with the yolk of raw eggs, cream, and cinnamon used to flavor tea.

Eventually, the “egg cream” came to be known as the misnamed drink without eggs and cream and “egg drinks” were phased out, left mostly in cocktail bars.

So, even though no one can really agree on how the name came to be, it’s pretty agreed on that candy shop owner Louis Auster invented the egg cream. His shop, on the Lower East Side of New York City, was one of many similar shops back in the day. It sold penny candy and had a counter where patrons drank drinks from the soda fountains.

Louis wanted something different to attract customers, so he created the Egg Cream. He was selling his egg cream drinks to low income customers, who just imagined that there was egg and cream in the drinks because that made them decadent and expensive feeling. And that was a feeling they couldn’t afford otherwise.

Louis has long passed, but the egg cream lives on. There are a bunch of delis and other locations in New York City where you can still get an egg cream, like Ray’s Candy Store and Brooklyn Farmacy.

Serve a New York Egg Cream cold. Like, as soon as you make it, serve it. Don’t let it sit while you’re making more for other people. The foam will deflate (quickly) and you won’t get the full egg cream flavor.

Skip the straw. If you use a straw, you’ll end up drinking the chocolate milk portion first and miss out on the fizzy foam. Gulp it all at once.

So yes, lots of rules for this traditional New York drink. But it’s worth it.