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Egg Lemonade
Put in a tall glass a raw egg, the juice of a lemon and a tablespoonful of sugar. Fill up the glass with water. Put some shaved ice in a shaker, put in the lemonade. Shake until well mixed, strain into the tall glass.
This is a raw-egg drink of the sort that filled soda-fountain and invalid-cookery pages for decades. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would make it safe, and the acid and ice do nothing useful on that front.
- The egg is never cookedThe whole egg goes into the glass raw and is drunk raw. Salmonella in eggs is an interior risk as well as a shell-surface one, and no amount of shaking with ice addresses it. This is the reason the recipe cannot be recommended as written.
- Lemon juice is not a kill stepA common assumption is that the acidity of a whole lemon sterilises the egg. It does not. Citric acid at drinking strength slows bacterial growth at best; it does not reliably reduce pathogens in the time it takes to shake a drink.
- Chilling works against youChilling does not make it safe — Shaved ice keeps the mixture cold and palatable. Cold slows bacterial growth but eliminates nothing, and the drink is served and consumed with no heat step at any point.
- Who was drinking itDrinks like this were pressed on convalescents, the elderly and children — the groups least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. If you want an egg-based cold drink today, use a current recipe built around pasteurised eggs.
- Reading the quantitiesFor historical interest: a tall glass of this kind would hold something on the order of 8 to 12 ounces, the juice of one lemon runs about 2 to 3 tablespoons, and the drink is a single serving. The straining appears to be to hold back the shaved ice rather than the egg.
Egg lemonade belongs to the long overlap between the soda fountain and the sickroom. Through the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, raw egg was treated as concentrated nourishment that could be got into someone who would not eat g gg nogg, egg phosphates, prairie oysters, and the beaten-egg-and-sherry mixtures that fill the invalid-cookery chapters of household manuals. Lemonade was the standard cooling drink for fever, so combining the two made obvious sense to a period that understood eggs as strengthening and had no working concept of egg-borne salmonellosis. The formula was not confined to the sickroom: the fountain trade sold egg lemonades across the counter as a matter of course.