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Some Kitchen Kinks: Separate
Separate the egg and beat the yolk until thick and lemon-colored, add the powdered sugar and brandy, beat again, then blend with white of the egg whipped to a stiff froth. This is so thick that it may be eaten with a spoon.
Rum and Milk. -1 cupful of rich milk; 1 egg; 1 tablespoonful of powdered sugar; dash of salt; 1 tablespoonful of rum; scraping of nutmeg. Separate the egg, beat the yolk until quite thick, add the powdered sugar, then the nutmeg, salt, rum, and, last of all, the white of the egg beaten thick. Put in a shaker with a few pieces of ice and shake till cold, then strain into a glass.
Mulled Wine. - 1 cupful of port wine; 2 tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar; 1 egg; 1 stick of cinnamon; cupful of water.
Three drinks from the invalid-and-nightcap end of the household book: a brandy flip, rum and milk, and a mulled wine. All lean on raw egg, and that is the sticking point rather than any question of technique.
- Raw egg, never heatedIn the flip and in the rum and milk, both yolk and white go into the glass uncooked; the rum and milk is shaken with ice, and nothing in either method brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on the shell egg survives into the finished drink.
- The spirits do not make it safeA tablespoonful of rum or brandy in a cupful of milk works out to a few percent alcohol at most, far below any level that would reduce bacteria, and the contact time is seconds.
- Milk as written"Rich milk" in a household book of this period would in many homes have meant unpasteurised whole milk from a dairy, and refrigeration could not be assumed. Combined with raw egg, this is a drink built on assumptions about supply that no longer hold. If you want an eggnog or a flip, use a current recipe with a cooked or pasteurised egg base.
- What "powdered sugar" meantIn books of this period powdered sugar is finely ground white sugar, roughly today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will leave a faint chalkiness in a clear drink.
- A cupfulTake the cupful as 8 fluid ounces. The mulled wine as printed gives its water quantity with no number in front of it at all, so treat that proportion as unknown rather than guessing.
- Scraping of nutmegA scraping is what comes off a whole nutmeg on a fine grater in two or three strokes -- less than an eighth of a teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity reads as dusty rather than aromatic.
- YieldEach of these makes roughly a single glass.
Flips, milk punches and mulled wines sat in a curious place in turn-of-the-century household manuals: filed near the sickroom chapter rather than under entertaining. A beaten egg with sugar and a spoonful of spirit was standard nourishment for invalids, convalescents and anyone thought to need building up, and the same formula served as a nightcap for the healthy. The whole-egg method here -- yolk beaten thick with sugar, white whipped separately and folded back in -- is the older confectioner's approach that gives body without cream, and it is why the compiler notes that the first drink is thick enough to eat with a spoon. Mulled wine with cinnamon and egg belongs to the same tradition of hot, sweetened, spiced wine reaching back through centuries of English hippocras and posset, drinks that were medicine and comfort in roughly equal measure.