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Egg Lemonade
Boil together two cups of sugar and three cups of water ten minutes. Add the grated rind of one lemon and the juice of three. Allow this to cool, and at serving time add one egg beaten until very light and creamy and one bottle of effervescent table water, poured from some hight in order that the mixture may foam. Serve with cracked ice in the glasses.
This is a raw-egg drink, and that is the whole problem: the beaten egg goes into a cold syrup and is served immediately, so nothing in the process ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. A current recipe should be used instead.
- The egg is never cookedThe sugar syrup is boiled, but it is deliberately cooled before the egg is added, and the effervescent water and cracked ice drop the temperature further. Egg proteins need to be held at roughly 160F to be safe; this mixture is served near freezing.
- Lemon juice is not a kill stepThe juice of three lemons in five-plus cups of liquid is nowhere near acidic enough to pasteurise egg. Acid slows bacterial growth in some preparations but does not sanitise a shell egg, and the shell exterior is a contamination route as well as the interior.
- Served to whoever is thirstyWho it may have been served to -- Egg drinks of this kind are often associated with invalids, convalescents and children, though this recipe specifies no such use. If it was given to them, that is the group for whom raw egg carries the highest risk.
- What "effervescent table water" wasA bottle of plain carbonated mineral water. Bottle sizes varied in this period, so the quantity the recipe intends is uncertain.
- The syrup itself is period-standardThe syrup itself is unremarkable -- Two cups sugar boiled ten minutes with three cups water is an ordinary lemonade syrup; the recipe gives no indication it was made in quantity or kept. The grated rind adds the oils that juice alone will not give.
- Pouring from a heightThe instruction is not decorative: the recipe says outright that the water is poured from a height so the mixture may foam, the carbonated water agitating the beaten egg as it falls.
Egg-enriched cold drinks were a fixture of American beverage chapters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sitting between the soda fountain and the sickroom. Beaten egg was regarded as nourishment in liquid form, prescribed for convalescents and thin children, and bottled effervescent table waters — Vichy, Apollinaris and their domestic imitators — were newly cheap and fashionable enough to be treated as a household staple rather than a druggist's item. The result was a family of drinks with names like egg lemonade and egg phosphate, all built on the same logic: a keeping syrup made in advance, a raw egg for body, and gas for lift. The genre survives in the classic bar sours and fizzes, though commercial practice now relies on pasteurised egg.