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Cider Egg Nog
To one egg whipped, then slightly sweetened with sugar, allow one glass of cider. Sprinkle with grated nutmeg and serve with shaved ice. Or serve hot.
APPLE WATER-"A Cooling Drink in Fevers" Pare and core three large juicy pippins and slice them into a pitcher or crock with the grated rind of a lemon. On this pour one pint of boiling water, then cover close and let stand four hours. Strain and sweeten with loaf sugar.
Two drinks run together on one page: an egg nog built on cider, and a lemon-apple infusion offered as sickroom refreshment. The first cannot be recommended as printed.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole egg is whipped, sweetened and drunk without any heating step, so the egg never reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella. Cider, whether sweet or hard, is not acidic or alcoholic enough to make that reliable. If you want an egg nog, use a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or a cooked custard base.
- "One glass of cider" is not a measurementHousehold drinking glasses of the period varied widely in size, and the book gives no clue which is meant. Nor does it say whether the cider is sweet or hard; in American books "cider" alone could mean the fresh-pressed juice, with "hard cider" specified when fermented, though usage was not consistent.
- Shaved iceBefore mechanical refrigeration this meant ice chipped or shaved from a block. Crushed ice from a bag is the modern equivalent.
- PippinsA pippin is properly an apple grown from seed rather than grafted, though in recipes of this kind the word often stood for a firm, sharp, juicy keeper such as the Newtown Pippin. Granny Smith or Braeburn stand in well for the apple water.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold as a hard cone or loaf and broken up with nippers as needed. Plain granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- Apple water proportions and yieldThree large apples and one pint of boiling water give roughly two cups of strained infusion, enough for two glasses. The four-hour covered steep is an extraction, not a fermentation, and the drink should be refrigerated once strained and used the same day.
- The lemon rindGrate only the coloured zest; the white pith beneath turns the infusion bitter over four hours of standing.
- "A cooling drink in fevers"Read this as period household medicine, not as instruction. It is a pleasant sweetened apple infusion and nothing more.
Egg nog belongs to a long line of English egg-and-drink posses and caudles, in which a beaten egg was used to enrich and thicken ale, wine or milk; the American branch attached itself to spirits, milk and Christmas, and is generally traced to colonial adaptations of those older drinks. Cider makes sense as the liquid in a book organised by fruit: in apple-growing regions it was the cheapest alcoholic drink in the house, pressed by the barrel each autumn, and it stood in for wine or brandy in a great many recipes. The apple water printed alongside it shows the other face of the fruit's reputation. Cooling, mildly acid drinks were standard sickroom fare through the nineteenth century, when nursing a fever meant chiefly keeping the patient hydrated and comfortable, and a lemon-scented apple infusion was thought both refreshing and safe when little else could be swallowed.