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Egg and Lemon
1 egg salt 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 teaspoon sugar Beat egg, add remaining ingredients, and serve cold. 2 cups milk
A raw-egg lemonade of the sort once given to invalids and served cold from the chafing-dish sideboard. The ingredient list as printed is scrambled by the original typesetting, and the drink itself relies on an uncooked shell egg.
- Why this one failsThe egg is beaten and served cold, with no heating step at any point. A raw shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella in the yolk and on the shell, and nothing here — not the lemon juice, not the sugar, not the milk — brings it to a temperature or acidity that would control it.
- No alcohol, unlike egg nogMany period egg drinks were fortified with brandy or sherry; high-alcohol versions are less hospitable to bacteria, though the effect depends on strength and time. This one has no alcohol at all, and it is served cold rather than cooked.
- The invalid-cookery context makes it worseDrinks like this were prescribed for the sick, the elderly and children — precisely the groups for whom a Salmonella infection is most likely to become serious. If you want an egg lemonade or an egg nog, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base.
- The garbled ingredient listThe "2 cups milk" is printed after the method rather than with the other ingredients. Read it as one of the ingredients, not a final step; the recipe is egg, lemon juice, sugar, salt and milk combined.
- Proportions, for the recordThree tablespoons of lemon juice to two cups of milk is enough acid to curdle the milk, though in cold milk this may happen gradually rather than instantly. Expect a thin, possibly separated drink rather than a smooth one.
- Chafing dish in name onlyNothing here is heated, so if the recipe does sit under a chafing-dish heading, that reflects where the drink was served rather than how it was made.
Beaten-egg drinks ran through nineteenth-century American cookery under a dozen names — egg lemonade, egg flip, milk punch, sherry flip — and sat on the border between refreshment and medicine. Lowney's was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional book for its chocolate and cocoa. The raw egg was regarded then as strengthening rather than risky: the connection between shell eggs and Salmonella enteritidis was not established until the late twentieth century, which is why recipes of this kind vanished from cookbooks only in living memory.