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Nutritive Drink
Beat three eggs thoroughly; add a pint of cold water, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, two glasses of sherry, and the strained juice of a fresh lemon. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient to fill two tumblers.
This is a Victorian invalid drink: three whole eggs, raw, never heated at any point. That single fact governs everything below.
- The eggs are never cookedNothing in the method brings the eggs above room temperature, and drinks of this kind were given to invalids and convalescents — precisely the people least able to withstand a Salmonella infection. Raw shell eggs remain a recognised risk unless pasteurised.
- The sherry does not make it safeTwo wine glasses of sherry — roughly 4 to 5 fl oz at around 17% alcohol — dispersed through a pint of cold water gives a finished drink of perhaps 2 to 3% alcohol. That is nowhere near strong enough to inactivate pathogens, and contact time is minutes, not weeks as in an aged egg nog.
- Lemon juice is not a kill stepThe acid brightens the flavour, but citrus juice at this dilution does not reliably destroy bacteria in raw egg.
- No holding instructionThe recipe gives no direction to chill or to drink immediately, and a pint of sweetened raw egg and water left standing in a warm room is an excellent growth medium.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or pasteurised liquid egg product. That change is not a small substitution, and it is not one we will improvise here.
- Reading the originalA "glass" of wine here is a wine glass of the period, about 2 to 2.5 fl oz, not a modern large stem. "Probable cost, 4d." is fourpence in pre-decimal currency, the routine costing Cassell's gave so a housekeeper could budget.
Nutritive drinks like this one belong to the sizeable Victorian literature of invalid cookery, a branch of household work that sat somewhere between the kitchen and the sickroom. Before intravenous feeding and commercial supplements, a patient who could not manage solid food was kept going on beef tea, arrowroot gruel, whey, and beaten-egg drinks of exactly this kind — egg flips, egg wines, and egg noggs, all variations on raw egg loosened with liquid, sweetened, and fortified with sherry, brandy or Marsala. The egg supplied protein and fat, the sugar supplied quick energy, and the wine was regarded as a stimulant and a restorative in its own right, a belief general in nineteenth-century medical and domestic writing. It was understood not as a pleasure drink but as a form of nursing, costed to the penny so that a household could reckon what it took to feed the sick.