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Egg Flip
Make one pint of ale warm, but not too hot. Beat two or three eggs, with three ounces of sugar, together, pour the mixture into the jug containing the ale, and then pour both back into an empty jug. This must be done quickly five or six times, until all is well mixed together; then grate ginger and nutmeg over the top, and the flip is quite ready. Serve in glasses while hot. Time, a few minutes. Probable cost, 7d.
A hot ale flip is easy to read as a period curiosity, but the method deliberately keeps the eggs below the temperature that would cook them, which is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The eggs are never cookedThe ale is warmed "but not too hot" precisely so the eggs thicken without scrambling, and the pouring between jugs cools the mixture further with every pass. Shell eggs are stirred into a warm liquid and served immediately; nothing in the process reaches the 160F/71C that would make raw egg safe.
- Warm is worse than cold or hotWarm is no improvement on cold -- A drink at blood heat is warm enough to keep any Salmonella present alive without killing it, and warmth is the range bacteria favour, though in the few minutes this takes there is little time for growth. The hazard is that nothing is pasteurised, unlike a custard taken to temperature over the heat.
- The ale does not sterilise anythingBeer at four or five per cent alcohol has no meaningful effect on pathogens in the timescale of this recipe. Fortified, long-aged eggnogs are sometimes cited as self-preserving; a pint of warm ale drunk at once is not comparable.
- Who it was served toWarm egg drinks of this kind were commonly given to invalids and convalescents, exactly the groups for whom raw egg carries the highest consequences. If you want the effect, use a current recipe for a cooked custard-based hot drink.
- Reading the originalA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, and three ounces of sugar is by weight, roughly six tablespoons, which is very sweet by modern taste. "Probable cost, 7d" is seven old pence, from the era of 240 pence to the pound.
Flip belongs to the long English and colonial American tradition of hot ale drinks thickened with egg, alongside possets, caudles and sack posset; the name is often said to derive from the flipping or tossing of the liquid between two vessels to raise a froth, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. In American taverns the same drink was often heated instead with a loggerhead, an iron poker kept in the fire and plunged into the tankard, which gave a faint scorched taste that drinkers reportedly prized. Such mixtures fitted the Victorian view of warm, sweet, egg-enriched drinks as semi-medicinal: they were standard sickroom fare, recommended for convalescents and the chilled, and appear in nineteenth-century household manuals as often under invalid cookery as under drinks.