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EGG GRUEL
Beat the yolk of an egg with a table-spoon of sugar, beating the white separately; add a tea-cup of boiling water to the yolk, then stir in the white, and add any seasoning; good for a cold.
This is a raw-egg invalid drink, and the single teacup of boiling water is the whole problem. The points below explain why it does not work as written rather than how to make it.
- The egg is never cookedThe egg is never reliably cooked -- a teacup of boiling water poured onto a single yolk gives an uncontrolled, unmeasured amount of heat, and the temperature falls further the moment the beaten white is stirred in. Nothing in the method holds the mixture at any known temperature for any length of time.
- Why that matters more here than elsewhereThis comes from the "Food For The Sick" chapter and was meant for someone already ill. Raw or undercooked egg is precisely what current guidance excludes for the sick, the very young, the elderly and the pregnant.
- The white is the greater riskEven where the hot water lightly thickens the yolk, the white is folded in afterwards and receives almost no heat at all. Shell surfaces and, less often, the interior can carry Salmonella; a gentle warming does not address it.
- "Any seasoning" concealed the textureNutmeg, sherry or brandy are the usual seasonings in nineteenth-century sickroom egg drinks, and they mask the raw taste. Alcohol at drinking strength does not sterilise egg.
- Archaic measures, for reading onlyA nineteenth-century tea-cup is smaller than the 8 fl oz cup used today, commonly reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, and "gruel" here means a thin drink rather than a porridge. The whole recipe makes one small glassful.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a cooked custard or eggnog-style drink, made with pasteurised egg or brought to a measured temperature. Do not adapt this one.
Egg gruels, egg wines and egg caudles run through nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, where eggs were valued as concentrated nourishment for a patient who could not face solid food. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (first published in Ohio in 1877 and much reprinted) devotes a whole section to "Food For The Sick," reflecting an era when nursing happened at home and the cook, not a hospital, decided what an invalid ate. The claim that it is "good for a cold" belongs to the same tradition as beef tea and barley water: light, warm, easily swallowed, and believed to build strength. The germ theory of foodborne illness was only beginning to shape household practice, and the specific hazard of Salmonella in shell eggs was not widely understood until well into the twentieth century, which is why a recipe like this could be recommended to the most vulnerable person in the house.