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Orange Eggnog
For each glass wanted beat the whites of 2 eggs stiff with 2 T sugar and the yolk of 1 egg with 2 T sugar. Mix lightly add grated rind of 1 orange and the juice of 3 oranges. Serve very cold.
Mrs. Paul Ray.
This is a raw-egg drink with no alcohol, no cooking and no heat at any stage, which puts it outside what can be recommended today. The notes below explain the specific problems and clarify the old shorthand.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whites and yolk go into the glass uncooked and are served cold. Salmonella Enteritidis lives inside intact shell eggs as well as on the shell, and nothing in this method — no heat, no acid soak of any duration, no alcohol — reduces it. A current recipe using pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg should be used instead.
- No alcohol to fall back onMany traditional eggnogs include spirit, and there is some experimental evidence that a high proportion of alcohol in eggnog held for several weeks reduces bacterial load. This version has none, so even that limited and much-qualified safeguard is absent.
- Orange juice is not a treatmentThe juice of three oranges sits around pH 3.5 to 4, acidic enough to taste sharp but far too weak and too brief in contact to make raw egg safe. Acidity in a cold drink should not be read as a substitute for pasteurisation.
- Who it is riskiest forAnyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised should not be served uncooked egg in any form.
- "T" in this bookT is the usual shorthand for tablespoon in collections of this kind. As written each glass takes four tablespoons of sugar, which is a great deal even against three oranges' juice.
- The ratio is unusualTwo whites to one yolk per glass means the whites are the body of the drink and the yolk only colours and enriches it. That is closer to an orange snow or a fluffy fizz than to the thick custardy eggnog most readers will expect.
- YieldThe quantities are given per glass, which is why the recipe reads oddly. Multiply straight through for the number of servings; expect a tall glass, mostly foam, from each unit.
Community cookbooks of the early twentieth century routinely filed eggnog under beverages for the sick as much as for celebration — beaten egg with milk, sugar and sometimes sherry was standard invalid nourishment, prescribed for convalescents and thin children well into the 1930s. This orange version, with no dairy and no spirit, fits the fruit-juice-and-egg tonics of the period; oranges were by then reliably shipped north in winter from Florida and California and carried a distinct aura of healthfulness. The word eggnog is generally traced to eighteenth-century English usage, with "nog" often said to mean a strong ale, though the derivation is not settled. What is certain is that in a book like this one, the name signalled a beaten-egg drink rather than any particular set of ingredients, which is how a version with neither milk nor liquor could be called eggnog without comment. The recipe carries an attribution to Mrs. Paul Ray, as such recipes typically did.