Eggnog
2 egg whites A few grains salt 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon egg yolk Add the salt to the whites, and beat them stiff. Beat in the lemon juice and sugar. Save out about one tablespoon of the beaten white. Beat the egg yolk into the remainder, and put it into a glass. On top put the egg white that was saved out.
Part of the mixture may be colored with any kind of fruit juice, as grape, raspberry, blackberry, or orange, if desired. Or a few fresh or stewed raspberries or a little diced orange may be stirred into it. The eggnog looks pretty if the ingredients are not thoroughly stirred together, but left so that some of the white and some of the yellow and some of the color of the fruit show.
This is an invalid's eggnog -- a nourishing egg drink of the sort served to the sick and to convalescent children -- and it is built entirely on raw egg that never sees heat.
- Why it fails todayBoth the beaten white and the yolk go into the glass raw and are eaten immediately. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is destroyed, and shell eggs in an ordinary retail carton are not sterile inside.
- The people it was written forDrinks like this were commonly given to invalids, small children and the elderly -- precisely the groups for whom an egg-borne infection is most likely to become serious.
- Lemon juice does not make it safeThe acid here is for flavour and for firming the foam. A teaspoon to a tablespoon of lemon juice in a single glass has no meaningful effect on bacteria in the yolk.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written around a cooked custard base or commercially pasteurised eggs, and follow its quantities and temperatures as given.
- On the yolk quantityThe ingredient list calls for a teaspoon of egg yolk against two whites, while the method speaks of "the egg yolk" as though a whole one were meant. The original leaves this genuinely unclear.
- No alcohol, despite the nameNineteenth- and early twentieth-century American eggnog covered both the spirituous punch and this plain sickroom drink of egg, sugar and flavouring. Nothing is missing from the list.