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Albuminized Milk
salt ½ cup milk Beat white until frothy; add salt and milk, and continue beating; strain and serve.
This is a raw-egg invalid's drink, and the whole point of it is that nothing is ever heated. That is also why it cannot be recommended now.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe egg white goes into the glass raw and is drunk raw. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and beating and straining do nothing to it. Nothing in the method brings any ingredient near the temperature at which egg is cooked safe (160F for egg dishes).
- The intended drinker is the problemAlbuminized milk was an invalid's drink, made for the sick and convalescent, and among the groups for whom an egg-borne infection is most likely to be serious. A drink of this kind is least safe for the people it was designed for.
- The milkThe half cup of milk would often have been raw as well when this was written. Commercial milk today is pasteurized, but that does not address the egg.
- A truncated ingredient lineThe text as printed opens mid-list: the egg white is implied by "beat white until frothy" but never stated, and the salt is unquantified. Period versions of this drink call for the white of one egg and a few grains of salt to a half cup of milk.
- What the straining is forBeating egg white with liquid leaves ropy threads of undissolved albumen; the strainer catches them so the drink pours smooth. It is a texture step only and has no bearing on safety.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized egg white or a commercial egg-white product rather than adapting this one.
Albuminized milk belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of invalid cookery, a category that occupied whole chapters of household manuals and taught nurses to build nourishment out of eggs, milk, beef juice, barley water and wine. Egg white was valued as almost pure albumen — hence the name — and was thought to be more easily borne by a weak stomach than the yolk or than solid food of any kind.