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Eggs
An egg broken into a cup of tea, or beaten and mixed with a basin of milk, makes a breakfast more supporting than tea solely. An egg divided, and the yolk and white beaten separately, then mixed with a glassful of wine, will afford two very wholesome draughts, and prove lighter than when taken together.
These are sickroom drinks from the era before egg-borne infection was understood, and the two problems with them are inseparable from the method itself.
- Raw egg, never heatedNothing here brings the egg to a safe temperature. A cup of tea poured over a broken egg, or an egg stirred into cold milk or wine, sits far below the roughly 160F/71C at which Salmonella in a shell egg is reliably destroyed. The white barely sets, which is proof enough that pasteurisation has not happened.
- Wine and tea are not disinfectantsTable wine is neither strong enough nor acidic enough to sterilise a raw egg in the few minutes before it is drunk, and tea that has cooled enough to swallow comfortably is well under the temperature needed.
- The intended drinker is the worst candidateThe likely drinker is the worst candidate -- Drinks of this kind sit squarely in the tradition of invalid cookery, food intended for the sick, the convalescent, the very young and the very old, though the recipe itself says only that it makes a 'supporting' breakfast. Those are precisely the groups in whom egg-borne infection is most likely to become severe. If a nourishing drink is wanted for someone unwell, use a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or a cooked custard base.
- "Basin" and "glassful"Neither is a precise measure. A basin in this period is a bowl, of no fixed capacity; a wineglassful is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz. The recipe gives no yield beyond "two draughts" -- that is, the yolk mixture and the white mixture drunk separately rather than together.
- "Supporting"Nineteenth-century nursing language for sustaining or nourishing. The claim being made is nutritional, not medicinal: an egg turns a cup of tea into something with protein and fat in it.
- Why the egg is separatedBeating yolk and white apart and combining them with wine was thought to make the drink "lighter" and easier on a weak stomach — the beaten white lends froth and volume. It is a texture argument, and it does nothing whatever about the safety of the raw egg.
Egg-and-wine and egg-and-milk draughts were standard equipment in the Victorian sickroom, where the working assumption was that an invalid who could not chew could still be fed by the spoonful or the glassful. Beef tea, arrowroot gruel, whey, wine whey and egg flip appear in nursing manuals and household compendia throughout the nineteenth century, and Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing (1859) discusses eggs among the concentrated foods offered to patients with no appetite -- sceptically, in her case, as she doubted their nourishing power. The reasoning was arithmetic rather than bacteriological: an egg was cheap, widely available and thought to carry a good deal of nourishment in a small compass, so it was stirred into whatever the patient would consent to drink. That the shell egg itself might be the source of illness was not part of the picture, and the routine sickroom use of raw egg persisted in print well into the twentieth century.