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Milk and Albumen
A pint of new milk, unbeaten whites of two eggs, a small pinch of salt. Put in a clean quart bottle, cork and shake hard for five minutes.
This is a raw drink: uncooked egg white in unpasteurised milk, shaken and swallowed. Nothing in the method brings either ingredient to a safe temperature, and it was intended for the people least able to withstand a foodborne infection.
- Raw egg white, no heat stepTwo unbeaten whites go straight into the bottle and straight into the patient. Salmonella can be present on the shell and within the egg itself, and shaking does nothing to it. There is no stage in this recipe at which anything reaches the 160F that would make the egg safe.
- "New milk" means unpasteurisedIn this period new milk meant fresh, unskimmed milk, which would ordinarily have been raw. Raw milk is a recognised vehicle for Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Combining it with raw egg compounds rather than dilutes the risk.
- The intended drinker is the problemThe likely drinker -- Drinks of this kind belonged to invalid cookery: food for the sick, the convalescent, the elderly and children, precisely the groups in whom these organisms cause severe illness. The recipe itself names no drinker, but if a nourishing drink is wanted for someone unwell, use a current recipe.
- AlbumenSimply the old name for egg white, from Latin albumen, white of egg. Nineteenth-century sickroom writing treated it as pure assimilable protein, which is why it appears undiluted and unheated.
- The bottle and the shakingA corked quart bottle shaken for five minutes was the period's substitute for a blender: it emulsifies the white into the milk so it goes down without strings. The technique is sound; the contents are not.
Invalid cookery filled its own chapter in many household manuals from the 1860s to the First World War, when nursing the sick happened at home and diet was one of the few interventions available. Milk, beef tea, gruel, barley water and albumen drinks made up the standard repertoire, ordered along a scale from thinnest to most "nourishing" as a patient improved. Raw egg white was prized because it was believed to pass into the system with almost no digestive effort, an idea that comes out of mid-century physiological chemistry and the era's confidence in albumen as protein in its purest form. The recipe also reflects a milk supply that was assumed to be fresh rather than treated: pasteurisation was still contested in American cities in the 1890s and 1900s, and "new milk" was a mark of quality, not a warning.