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Egg Cordial
Beat the white of an egg to a froth, add a table-spoonful of cream and one of brandy. Mix thoroughly. Probable cost, 4d.
A three-ingredient invalid's draught from the era when raw egg was considered a restorative. The problem is the egg, and it cannot be worked around within these instructions.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white is beaten and drunk uncooked, and nothing in the method brings it above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the white, and a tablespoon of brandy is nowhere near enough alcohol to inactivate it. This was written before that risk was understood.
- Who it was served toCordials of this kind belonged to invalid cookery, and such drinks were generally intended for the sick and convalescent — often the very people for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become serious. The likely audience for the dish is a poor one for it.
- Raw cream as wellNineteenth-century cream was unpasteurised, and no heating of it is called for here. Combined with raw egg white, the drink contains two uncooked animal products.
- If you want the drinkEgg-and-spirit drinks are still made, and a current recipe using appropriate ingredients should be followed instead of this one.
- Reading the quantitiesA Victorian table-spoonful is close to the modern one, roughly 15 ml, though household spoons of the period varied. "Probable cost, 4d" is fourpence in pre-decimal money — Cassell's gives a probable cost for most of its recipes so that a housekeeper could budget, which is why even a single glass of brandy and cream gets a price.
This belongs among the simplest of the "cordials" — a word that once meant a drink for the heart, from the Latin cor, and which by the late nineteenth century covered everything from medicinal draughts to sweetened liqueurs. Beaten egg, cream and spirit belong to the same family as caudle, egg flip, egg wine and the sickroom eggnog, all of which treated the raw egg as concentrated nourishment that a patient too weak to chew could still swallow. The brandy was understood as a stimulant rather than a flavouring. The reasoning was not unsound by the standards of the day: an egg genuinely is dense in protein and fat, and a spoonful of cream more so. What the period lacked was any notion that the egg itself might be the source of illness, a connection not firmly established until bacteriology matured well after this book was compiled.