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Ginger Egg Flip
Beat up four eggs with half a pint of good mild ale, add half an ounce of grated ginger. Boil one and a half pints of mild ale, and add half a pound of crushed brown sugar-candy; stir, and add it gradually to the eggs, etc., stirring all the time. Beat hard for a few minutes, and serve hot. Probable cost, 1s.
A hot ale posset in all but name, and the whole recipe turns on temperature control: boiling ale poured too fast into beaten egg gives you sweet ginger scrambled eggs.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint is 10 imperial fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups; the pint and a half of boiling ale is about 3 1/2 US cups. Total liquid is two imperial pints, a little over a litre.
- Temper, do not dumpAdd the boiling ale to the eggs in a thin stream while whisking hard, and keep whisking for a minute after. If it looks grainy it has already curdled; straining will rescue the texture but not the body.
- Bring it to a safe temperatureThe hot ale should carry the mixture past 160F/71C, which is what cooks the eggs. Check with a thermometer, and if it falls short, hold the pan over a low heat while stirring constantly — never let it boil.
- Mild aleIn the nineteenth century 'mild' meant young, unaged ale, lightly hopped and comparatively sweet; colour varied, and the dark mild familiar today is largely a later development. A modern English mild or a brown ale works; a hoppy bitter or IPA turns aggressively bitter once heated.
- Brown sugar-candyCrystallised cane sugar sold in lumps, roughly equivalent to demerara or rock sugar. Half a pound in two pints is very sweet by current taste — 4 oz is closer to drinkable, and it dissolves faster crushed.
- The gingerHalf an ounce is 14 g. Victorian recipes grated dried root ginger as well as fresh, so 'grated' does not settle which is meant; half an ounce of fresh root is assertive but reasonable, while half an ounce of dried ground ginger would be overwhelming and gritty -- if using dried, start with a rounded teaspoon.
- Serve at onceMakes four to six small cups. It separates and thins as it stands, so pour it foaming into warmed glasses or mugs and grate nutmeg over if you like.
"Flip" was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century name for a drink of beer and sugar heated with a spirit, with egg appearing in some versions; in taverns on both sides of the Atlantic it was traditionally finished by plunging a red-hot poker or loggerhead into the tankard, which scalded the mixture and gave it a faintly burnt note that the domestic stove-top version lacks. Drinks of this kind sat on the border between refreshment and medicine: hot ale, egg and ginger were often said to be household comforts for a chill or a long night, the ginger for warmth and the egg for nourishment. Its close relatives are the ale posset and the caudle, both of which set egg with a hot alcoholic liquid, and the sweet, spiced, egg-thickened family that survives today as eggnog.