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Egg and Milk Punch
1 tablespoon whiskey or brandy 2 teaspoons sugar Beat yolk; add milk, liquor and sugar, pour into glass; add well-beaten white of egg, stir lightly, and serve.
A single-serving egg punch of the sort once poured for invalids and late suppers. It is built on a raw egg that never sees heat, which is where the problem lies.
- Why this one failsThe yolk and white go into the glass raw and are drunk immediately. There is no cooking step, no custard stage, and nothing to bring the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. A tablespoon of whiskey in a glass of milk is nowhere near enough alcohol to sterilize anything.
- The eggs are not the same eggsShell eggs today move through long distribution chains and are washed, which removes the cuticle; contamination can also be present inside an intact egg. If you want a drink of this type, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or a cooked base.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the recipe gives only the whiskey and the sugar. The egg and the milk appear in the method but carry no quantities, so even the proportions have to be guessed at.
- Who it was forDrinks of this kind appear in the invalid-cookery literature, intended for the sick and for convalescents. Those are precisely the groups most vulnerable to egg-borne infection, which is worth knowing before treating the recipe as a harmless curiosity.
- Chafing dish section, no heatNothing in the method goes near the flame; there is no cooking step at all, whatever the surrounding chapter.
Egg and milk punches belong to a long line of fortified restoratives — posset, caudle, syllabub, eggnog — in which egg, dairy, sugar and spirit were combined as much for nourishment as for pleasure. Through the nineteenth century such drinks sat squarely in the invalid-cookery chapter of American and British household manuals, prescribed for convalescents who could not manage solid food. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early twentieth century and compiled by Maria Willett Howard, carries a chafing dish chapter aimed at the fashionable habit of cooking and mixing at the table before guests, where a punch stirred up on the spot was part of the entertainment. The raw-egg drink survived in bars and sickrooms alike well into the twentieth century; what changed was not the recipe but the understanding of what an uncooked egg can carry.