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UNCOOKED EGG
This is quite palatable, and very strengthening, and may be prepared in a variety of ways. Break an egg into a goblet and beat thoroughly, add a tea-spoon sugar, and after beating a moment add a teaspoon or two of brandy or port wine; beat well and add as much rich milk, or part cream and milk, as there is of the mixture. Or, omit brandy and flavor with any kind of spice; or, milk need not be added, or the egg may be beaten separately, stirring in lightly the well-whipped whites at the last.
This is a raw-egg invalid drink, made for exactly the people who should never be given one. The problems are with the concept, not the proportions.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe egg is beaten and swallowed without any cooking step. Intact, clean-looking shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis inside the yolk, and nothing in this preparation reaches a temperature that would inactivate it.
- The intended drinker is the wrong drinkerThis is a sick-room preparation. Invalids, the elderly, small children and anyone with a compromised immune system are precisely the groups for whom a salmonella infection turns from a bad week into a hospital admission.
- The brandy does nothingA teaspoon or two of spirit diluted into a glass of egg and milk is nowhere near strong enough to sterilise anything. The alcohol here is a flavouring and a nineteenth-century stimulant, not a safeguard.
- "Rich milk, or part cream and milk"In 1877, before commercial pasteurisation, this meant raw milk. That is two uncooked animal products in one glass.
- Beating the whites separately makes it worseBeating the whites separately is no improvement -- The variation that whips the whites and folds them in at the last adds handling but changes nothing about the raw egg at the centre of the drink.
- If you want the drinkModern versions of egg nog and similar invalid drinks are built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurised eggs. Use a current recipe written for one of those.
- Reading the originalA goblet here is simply a stemmed drinking glass; "as much rich milk as there is of the mixture" means equal volumes of milk and beaten egg. Noted for the sake of understanding the text, not for making it.
Raw egg beaten with sugar, spirits and milk was one of the standard sickroom foods of the nineteenth century, sitting alongside beef tea, arrowroot gruel and wine whey in American household manuals of the period. The logic was straightforward: a patient who could not chew or keep down solid food could still swallow something liquid, and eggs, cream and brandy were understood as concentrated "strengthening" nourishment at a time when convalescent care was mostly a matter of getting calories into someone. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by Ohio churchwomen and first published in 1877, includes such preparations because nursing the sick at home was ordinary domestic work, not a medical speciality. The connection between eggs and salmonella was not established until the twentieth century, and the strain that contaminates the interior of intact eggs was not widely recognised until the 1980s, which is why a book like this can recommend raw egg to an invalid in perfectly good faith.