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Some Kitchen Kinks: Lemonade
Egg Lemonade.-2 tablespoonfuls of sugar; 1 egg; 3 tablespoonfuls of cold water; 1 lemon.
Beat sugar and egg thoroughly, then mix cold water and the lemon juice; put chipped ice in the glass, and fill with ice water.
Egg and Coffee.-1 egg; 1 tablespoonful of sugar; ½ cupful of boiling coffee. Beat egg and sugar together and add the boiling coffee gradually; stir, and add hot cream.
Possett.-1 cupful of milk; 1 tablespoonful of molasses. Let milk come to a boiling point, add molasses, stir well, strain, and serve.
WHAT THE HOME NURSE OUGHT TO KNOW 1141 Pick-me-up. - 1 tablespoonful of powdered sugar; 1 egg; dash of salt; 1 tablespoonful of brandy.
Four sickroom beverages from the home-nursing section of the book. Three of the four are built on raw or barely warmed egg, which is exactly the population — the ill, the convalescent, the elderly — for whom that is now considered unacceptable.
- Raw egg, served to invalidsThe egg lemonade and the pick-me-up beat a whole raw egg into a cold drink and serve it immediately. Salmonella in shell eggs is an infection risk for anyone, and specifically dangerous for the people these drinks were intended for. Nothing in either recipe brings the egg anywhere near 160F.
- The coffee version is not cooked eitherThe coffee version is not reliably cooked either -- half a cupful of boiling coffee stirred gradually into a beaten egg may or may not carry the mixture to a pasteurising temperature, and the recipe offers no way to know; hot cream is then stirred in. Tempering is not dependable cooking, and this should not be treated as a custard.
- The pick-me-up is incompleteSugar, egg, salt and a tablespoonful of brandy, with no liquid, no method and no glass. The page appears to break off mid-entry. A tablespoon of brandy is also nowhere near enough alcohol to do anything to the egg, if that was ever the intention.
- Posset does not mean what it means nowThe modern posset is a set cream dessert. Here it is the older sense: hot milk curdled or thickened with something acid or sweet, drunk from a cup. The molasses meant here is cane molasses, closer to modern dark molasses than to light table syrup, and a tablespoonful will dominate a cupful of milk.
- The posset is the one you can actually makeMilk brought to a boil, molasses stirred in, strained and served hot involves no raw egg and no ambiguity. It makes a single cup and is thin — a drink rather than a dessert.
- If you want the othersEgg lemonade and its relatives survive in modern form using pasteurised shell eggs or liquid pasteurised egg product. Use a current recipe written for those ingredients rather than adapting these.
- "Chipped ice"Ice chipped from a block with a pick, finer than cubes and closer to today's crushed ice. It was there to chill fast in a house with an icebox rather than a freezer.
These four entries sit under the heading "What the Home Nurse Ought to Know," and that placement explains everything about them. Before the middle of the twentieth century, feeding the sick was a recognised branch of domestic cookery with its own small canon: beef tea, barley water, gruel, milk toast, and above all egg drinks, valued because a raw egg beaten into liquid was thought to deliver concentrated nourishment to someone who could not chew or would not eat. The posset is the oldest thing on the page: the drink, curdled with ale or wine and sweetened or spiced, is recorded in English households for centuries and was standard for colds and sleeplessness long before it became a dessert. The "pick-me-up," with its brandy, belongs to the later Victorian and Edwardian sense of the word: a restorative for exhaustion or a hangover, sitting on the boundary between medicine and a morning drink. What the page really documents is a period in which raw egg was widely regarded as a suitable food for a weak stomach.