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Beef Broth and Egg
Make a good broth and pour over a well-beaten egg. Season with salt and serve with a slice of delicately browned toast.
This is a two-line convalescent dish from the invalid chapter, and the mechanism that makes it appealing — raw egg loosened by hot liquid — is exactly the part that no longer passes.
- The egg is never cookedThe recipe gives no quantity of broth and no heat step. Hot broth poured over a beaten egg in a bowl loses temperature immediately and is unlikely to reach or hold a pasteurising temperature, so the result is a warm suspension of raw egg rather than a cooked custard.
- Salmonella and the intended eaterRaw shell egg carries a small but real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, and this recipe is written specifically for the sick, the elderly and the recovering — the group least able to tolerate it. The population the dish was designed to nourish is the one current guidance tells you not to serve raw egg to at all.
- No temperature, no timing, no checkThe instruction gives no heat, no standing time and no visual endpoint. There is nothing in it that could be verified even by a careful cook, which is why it cannot simply be tightened up. If you want a nourishing broth for an invalid, use a current recipe.
- "A good broth" in this bookIt means a home-made, long-simmered meat broth rather than anything from a cube; broth of this kind was regarded as a food in its own right rather than merely a base.
- What "delicately browned" meansToast in invalid cookery was generally wanted thin and pale gold rather than dark, on the assumption that a heavily browned, bitter crust would not suit a weak appetite.
- Why it appears at allThe egg was there for what the period called strength — protein and fat in a form that needed no chewing. Modern convalescent cooking gets the same effect from a fully cooked egg or from the broth alone.
Nearly every general cookbook of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried an "invalid cookery" or "cookery for the sick" chapter, because home nursing was the norm: hospitals served only a portion of the sick, and a long convalescence from typhoid, pneumonia or childbirth was managed in a bedroom by the women of the household. The chapters run to beef tea, barley water, gruels, wine whey, koumiss and scraped raw beef, all built on the then-current belief that a depleted body needed concentrated animal nourishment in the most easily swallowed form possible. Raw or barely set egg beaten into a hot liquid was one of the standard vehicles, and the same trick survives in the eggnogs, egg-and-milk drinks and "egg in wine" of the period. The nutritional reasoning was largely wrong — far less protein than its makers supposed, a point chemists are said to have begun arguing in the same era — and the microbiological reasoning was absent, since the link between shell eggs and salmonellosis was not understood for decades yet.