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Sherry and Egg
Break an egg into a basin, and put in a tea-spoonful of sugar; beat the two together until the sugar is thoroughly mixed with the egg, but not enough to make the egg froth. To this add two table-spoonfuls of sherry and a fourth of a cup of cold water, mixing them thoroughly. Strain all into a tumbler, and serve immediately. Probable cost, 6d.
This is an invalid drink — a raw egg beaten with sherry and water, served at once. The egg is never heated at any point, which is precisely the problem.
- Raw egg, no heat stepNothing in this recipe brings the egg above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the yolk, and neither sugar nor two tablespoons of sherry diluted with cold water will inactivate it. The drink is served immediately, so there is not even the doubtful protection of an acid or alcohol soak.
- Who it was made forEgg-and-wine drinks of this kind were commonly given to the sick and convalescent, groups for whom a salmonella infection is more likely to be severe. The intended audience makes the risk worse, not better.
- Straining is not a safeguardStraining into the tumbler would catch the chalazae and any shell fragments, so the drink pours smooth. Whatever its purpose, it does nothing to the bacterial load.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written around pasteurised egg product or in-shell pasteurised eggs, with the handling instructions that go with them.
- Reading the measuresFor the sake of understanding the original: a tumbler is roughly a 6-8 oz straight-sided glass, and the quarter cup of cold water plus two tablespoons of sherry makes a short drink of about four ounces.
- Probable cost, 6dSixpence was a real sum for a single glass, and most of it would be the sherry. Cassell's gives a 'probable cost' for most entries.
Sherry and egg belongs to the long British tradition of invalid cookery — the section of the household manual dealing with what to feed someone too ill to manage a meal. It sits among the same family of sickroom preparations as beef tea, arrowroot, barley water and egg flip, all built on the same conviction that a nourishing drink could be got down a patient who would refuse solid food. Eggs and fortified wine were understood as concentrated strength, and sherry in particular carried a medical respectability in Victorian Britain that gin or whisky did not; doctors prescribed it and it stood on the sickroom sideboard without embarrassment. The recipe is essentially an unwhipped relation of the eggnog and the flip, stripped of spice and cream because the point was digestibility rather than pleasure — hence the instruction to mix the sugar in without frothing the egg, and to strain out anything the invalid might notice.