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Egg Nog
Beat the yolk of an egg with a teaspoonful of sugar. Whip the white, add them together, put in a tall glass, add a teaspoonful of sherry or rum flavoring, fill up the glass with rich milk, mix well or shake, grate a little nutmeg on top.
A single-glass drink from the era of bottled flavoring essences. The instructions are clear enough, but the egg is the problem: nothing here is ever heated.
- Raw egg, never cookedBoth yolk and white go into the glass uncooked and the drink is served cold. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, and neither sugar nor a teaspoon of alcohol-free flavoring does anything to it. A current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg should be used instead.
- Who is most at riskThe hazard is not evenly distributed. Small children, pregnant women, anyone over about 65 and anyone immunocompromised are the people for whom a raw-egg drink is genuinely dangerous rather than merely inadvisable.
- "Sherry or rum flavoring"An alcohol-free essence sold by the bottle during Prohibition, closer to a baking extract than to a spirit. Modern rum extract is the nearest survivor; sherry flavoring is much harder to come by today.
- "Rich milk"Milk of the period was generally sold unhomogenized with the cream line visible, and "rich" is usually taken to mean milk from the top of the bottle. Whole milk with a splash of cream is the closest equivalent; skim will give a thin, foamy drink.
- YieldOne tall glass, roughly 8 to 10 ounces once the whipped white has expanded. It is a single serving, not a punch bowl.
- NutmegGrated fresh over the top rather than stirred in. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months and the garnish is doing real work here.
Egg nog is usually traced to posset and other British egg-and-milk drinks fortified with wine or ale, and the American version rewithout with easy access to rum and to their own cows became fixed as a holiday drink through the nineteenth century. What makes this particular version a period document is the flavoring: under Prohibition (1920-1933), bottled "sherry," "rum" and "brandy" flavors let a cook produce the taste of a fortified drink without the drink. It is an egg nog reimagined as an everyday item, which is roughly what a milkshake with nutmeg on it amounts to.