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Orangeade
Put the juice of an orange and a tablespoonful of sugar in a tall glass and fill half full of water. Stir well and add the stiffly beaten white of an egg and some cracked ice, stir together and serve.
A plain orange drink built on a raw egg white, which is where it fails for a modern kitchen: nothing in this glass is ever heated.
- Raw egg white, unheatedThe beaten white goes straight into a cold drink and is never cooked. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, inside; whipping and chilling do nothing to it. This is the single reason the recipe cannot be recommended as written.
- Why the drink is riskier than a raw egg in a batterRaw egg destined for a cake or custard is brought to temperature later. Here the foam is the finished garnish, served immediately at ice temperature, so any organism present arrives intact in the glass.
- Who this matters most forChildren, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised are the groups public health agencies specifically warn away from uncooked egg. A cold drink is an easy thing to hand to exactly those people.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe for an egg-white citrus drink from a source that specifies a safe egg product, or make the orangeade without the white at all. We are not supplying a revised method here.
- The non-egg parts, for referenceThe proportions are a single orange's juice, about 1 tablespoon sugar, and water to fill a tall glass halfway — roughly one fairly sweet serving. "Cracked ice" means ice broken into coarse pieces, coarser than crushed.
Orangeade belongs to the long family of household "-ades" — lemonade, limeade — that filled the cold-drink chapters of American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when a sweetened fruit juice and water was the standard answer to summer heat in a house without refrigeration beyond an icebox. The beaten egg white is a period touch rather than a flavouring: whites were whipped into lemonades, milk shakes and "egg nogg" style drinks to give body and a foam cap, and egg was widely regarded as strengthening, which is why such drinks turn up in invalid cookery as well as in party sections. Books with titles in the vein of Cook and Be Cool were pitched at exactly this use — quick, uncooked, hot-weather fare made at the kitchen table — and the routine use of a raw egg in them reflects a period before Salmonella in shell eggs was understood as a food-safety problem.