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Some Kitchen Kinks: Pour
Pour the water over the cinnamon and let it steep in a double boiler for ten minutes, add the sugar, beat the egg stiff, pour over it the flavored water, lifting out the cinnamon, add the wine, pour it all into a shaker and shake hard till the drink is thoroughly blended. If liked cold, add a bit of ice to it; if hot, set the shaker in boiling water for a few minutes.
Flaxseed Lemonade.-2 cupfuls of cold water; 1 tablespoonful of whole flaxseed; 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar; juice of 1 lemon.
Wash the flaxseed, put in a double boiler, pour the water over it and steep for an hour. Sweeten, add the lemon juice, and strain. This is a valuable remedy in a case of hoarseness or inflamed throat. Slippery-elm Tea.-1/4 teaspoonfuls of slippery-elm powder; 2 cupfuls of boiling water; 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar; juice of 1 lemon.
Pour the boiling water over the slippery elm; when cool, strain, sweeten, and flavor with the lemon juice.
Ice Chocolate.- cupful of milk; cupful of Apollinaris; 2 tablespoonfuls of chipped ice; 2 tablespoonfuls of chocolate sirup; ful of whipped cream. cup- Put these ingredients into a shaker and shake till frothy. Strain into a tumbler.
Kumiss.- cake of yeast; 4 cupful of sugar; 1/4 cupful of water; 3 quarts of milk.
Boil the sugar and water for a few minutes, dissolve the yeast in 2 tablespoonfuls of water, heat the milk till lukewarm, add the yeast and water, and stir. Put into thoroughly clean beer bottles, set them upright for twelve hours in a warm room, then lay on their sides in a refrigerator.
When the kumiss is twenty-four hours old it is ready to drink.
Rice Milk. - 2 tablespoonfuls of rice; 2 cupfuls of scalded milk; 1 teaspoonful of sugar; dash of salt. Soak the rice over night in cold water. Next morning put in a double boiler with the milk and seasoning, stir occasionally, and let it steam for an hour and a half. Rub through a sieve, grate a scraping of nutmeg over it, and, if desired, put a tablespoonful of whipped cream on top. Serve hot or cold.
PROVEN "HOME REMEDIES" Gruels are more tempting to the sick if whipped to a froth with an egg beater before serving in a pretty cup.
Beef tea is wanted frequently when there is little time to prepare it. It can be made quickly in the following manner: take a lean piece of beef, run it through a food cutter, using the finest cutter; cover with cold water and set at the back part of the range to heat. Do not let it boil, as that coagulates the albumen. Stir thoroughly, strain, and squeeze dry in a potato masher. This will extract all the juice of the beef quickly and easily. a As As a pick-me-up," nothing is more nourishing than the white of a fresh egg beaten to a froth, slightly sweetened, and blended with the juice of a sweet orange.
This is a run of sickroom drinks from the invalid-cookery pages of a household manual, and two of them are not safely reproducible. The flaxseed lemonade, slippery-elm tea, ice chocolate and rice milk are harmless; the kumiss and the beef tea are the reason for the warning above.
- Kumiss: bottle fermentation without controlBaker's yeast is pitched into milk warmed only to lukewarm, held twelve hours in a warm room, and put into beer bottles (the recipe does not say to stopper them, though laying them on their sides implies a closure). Nothing in the method ever reaches a pasteurising temperature and no acid or measured starter culture is used, so spoilage and pathogenic organisms have as good a chance as the yeast. Sealed bottles of actively fermenting milk also build carbon dioxide pressure with no venting instruction, and glass under that pressure fails. Buy commercial kefir or kumiss instead.
- Beef tea: deliberately kept below cooking heatThe instruction is explicit that the minced beef must not boil, because heat coagulates the albumen the author is trying to extract. That is the same reasoning that makes it unsafe: ground beef holds surface bacteria throughout the mince, and juice pressed from meat held merely warm at the back of the range has been given ideal conditions rather than lethal ones. Ground beef needs 160F throughout.
- Raw egg white "pick-me-up"Uncooked egg white beaten with orange juice was standard convalescent fare and carries a salmonella risk that was not understood at the time. If something of the kind is wanted, use pasteurised egg white.
- Double boilerMost of the steeping instructions here specify one (the slippery-elm tea does not), and it matters for the flaxseed and the rice milk: direct heat scorches milk and makes flaxseed mucilage stick and catch. A heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same job.
- Flaxseed and slippery elmWhole flaxseed (linseed) is sold in any health-food aisle; steeped an hour it gives a thick, faintly sweet mucilage, which is the point of the drink. Slippery-elm powder is the inner bark of Ulmus rubra and is still sold as a herbal product, though supply is limited and it is best bought from a reputable herbalist. Neither is a treatment for anything; they are soothing, nothing more.
- ApollinarisA German mineral water, sold everywhere in 1900 as the standard sparkling table water. Any plain carbonated mineral water gives the same effect in the ice chocolate.
- Chocolate sirupThe thin sweetened cocoa syrup of the period, closer to modern chocolate soda syrup than to fudge sauce. Two tablespoonfuls of a commercial chocolate syrup is the right substitution.
- Rice milk quantitiesTwo tablespoonfuls of rice to two cupfuls of milk, steamed ninety minutes and sieved, gives a thin, nutmeg-scented pap intended as an invalid's serving, not a family dish.
- The unnamed first drinkThe opening paragraph is the tail of a cinnamon-and-wine egg flip: hot spiced water beaten into stiff egg, wine added, shaken. Its ingredient list does not appear on this page, so treat the method as description rather than a recipe you can follow.
Many American household encyclopaedias of the 1890s and 1900s carried a chapter like this one — "invalid cookery," or here, "proven home remedies" — because nursing the sick was done at home, by the women of the household, and the kitchen was the dispensary. The logic behind these drinks is nutritional rather than pre-bacteriological: illness was thought to be met with concentrated nourishment in the most easily swallowed form, which is why beef tea is pressed rather than boiled (heat was believed to destroy its virtue) and why raw egg white beaten with orange juice counted as a tonic. Kumiss belongs to the same moment for a different reason: the fermented mare's milk of the Central Asian steppe had been taken up by European and American physicians in the 1870s and 1880s as a digestible food for consumptives and dyspeptics, and cow's-milk imitations raised with baker's yeast were sold by chemists and made at home. Flaxseed and slippery elm, both simple demulcents, are the oldest items in the list and the only ones still in common household use.