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Port Flip
Beat up an egg in a tumbler, add a little sugar, a glass of port wine, and some pounded ice. Strain before drinking. Probable cost, 8d.
A Victorian flip is essentially a single raw egg suspended in fortified wine, served cold and unheated. The measurements are of their period, but the egg is the reason this one belongs in the reading pile rather than the glass.
- The raw egg is the problemNothing in this recipe brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella; the ice actively works against it. The alcohol in a glass of port is nowhere near sufficient to make a shell egg safe. A current recipe using pasteurised egg should be used instead.
- Straining is not a safety stepThe instruction to strain would catch shell fragments and stringy albumen so the drink pours smooth. It does nothing about pathogens, which is worth saying because the wording can read as though the egg is being dealt with.
- "A glass of port"In Victorian bar usage a wine glass is a standard measure of roughly 2 fl oz, not a modern stemmed glass. A tumbler here is a plain straight-sided glass of about 8-10 fl oz, which is the mixing vessel as well as the serving vessel.
- "Pounded ice"Ice crushed in a canvas bag with a mallet, not cubes. It chills fast and dilutes fast, so the drink was made and drunk immediately.
- Probable cost, 8dEight pence is the price of the ingredients in late-Victorian retail, not a serving suggestion. Cassell's costed almost every entry this way so a household could judge a dish against its weekly budget.
- YieldOne glass, one drinker. Flips of this kind were made to order, singly, and the quantities given are loose ones -- "a little sugar", "a glass" of port, "some" ice.
A flip is one of the oldest categories in English drinking: originally a mixture of beer, spirit and sugar heated by plunging a red-hot iron loggerhead into the tankard, a practice recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The name is sometimes said to derive from the drink's frothy, "flipped" body, though the etymology is unsettled. By the time Cassell's was compiled the hot iron had gone and the egg had arrived, so that a flip meant any short drink of wine or spirit shaken or beaten with a whole egg and sugar - port, sherry, brandy and rum flips all appear in period bar books. Such drinks sat in an odd space between refreshment and medicine; eggs beaten into wine were routinely prescribed for invalids, convalescents and the elderly as a concentrated restorative, which is part of why a general-purpose household dictionary of cookery carried them at all.