At this point, you've realized an egg cream is a funny name for this 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, 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." And finally, Theory 3 is that the real name is "a cream," 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 eggs and cream. 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.