Milk Eggnog
1 egg 1/2 cup milk (part cream, if desired) 2 teaspoons sugar 4 drops vanilla Beat the ingredients well together and serve in a glass.
A single-serving drink of raw egg beaten into cold milk. Nothing in it is ever heated, which is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- Raw shell egg, never cookedThe whole egg goes into the glass uncooked and is drunk immediately. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the yolk, and no step here brings the mixture anywhere near the 160F at which egg proteins are pasteurized.
- Who it was made forDrinks of this kind were served to invalids, small children, convalescents and the elderly — precisely the groups for whom a salmonellosis infection is most likely to become serious. The intended audience makes the risk worse, not milder.
- Milk as writtenMilk of this period may well have been unpasteurised, since commercial pasteurisation was not yet general. Unpasteurized dairy carries its own load of pathogens and compounds the problem rather than diluting it.
- Beating does nothing to itWhisking aerates the egg and disperses the yolk; it has no antimicrobial effect. Neither sugar nor four drops of vanilla contributes anything that would inhibit bacteria.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a pasteurized egg product, from a source that gives temperatures.
- YieldOne glass, about six ounces, intended to be drunk at once rather than held.
Eggnog in American cookbooks of this period splits into two lines: the spirituous Christmas punch, and the plain "milk eggnog" of the sickroom, which is what this is. Books of the era routinely carried a section of invalid cookery — beef tea, gruel, barley water, wine whey, egg drinks — because a household nursed its own patients, and the goal was to get concentrated nourishment into someone who could not face solid food. An egg beaten into milk was the era's most compact answer: protein, fat and sugar in a glass, requiring no fire and no cook's skill. The word nog is generally traced to an old East Anglian term for strong ale, with the egg-and-drink sense established in English by the eighteenth century. That the recipe involves no heat at all was seen as its virtue in 1900; germ theory was accepted by then, but the specific link between shell eggs and Salmonella in the yolk itself was not understood until well into the twentieth century.