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Egg Cordial
1 egg white 1 teaspoon sugar 1 tablespoon brandy or wine few grains salt 2 tablespoons cream Beat white until frothy; add cream and continue beating; add remaining ingredients and serve immediately.
This is a raw-egg drink of the invalid-cookery type, and it is the raw egg that rules it out rather than anything about the technique.
- The egg white is never cookedNothing in this recipe brings the white to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present inside an intact, clean, unbroken shell egg. A tablespoon of brandy does not sterilise anything; the alcohol in the finished glass is nowhere near a level that would make raw egg safe.
- Who it was served toEgg drinks of this kind belonged to invalid cookery and were associated with the sick and convalescent — among the groups for whom a foodborne infection is most likely to become serious. The intended audience is the reason to leave the recipe on the page rather than in the glass.
- Not a hot chafing-dish dishDespite its place in the chafing-dish chapter, the cordial involves no heat at all. The chafing dish is there for the rest of the section; this one is beaten cold and drunk at once.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a modern source that addresses egg safety directly. We are not going to supply times or substitutions here.
- Units, for readingThe measures are standard American spoon measures and need no conversion. "Cream" is unqualified here; period books distinguished thin from thick cream, so the intended richness is not certain. "Few grains salt" is a pinch.
- YieldOne small glass; the recipe directs that it be served immediately.
Egg drinks of this kind sat on the border between the kitchen and the sickroom for most of the nineteenth century, and general cookbooks of the period often carried a few, such as egg nog and egg flip. They were understood as nourishment for people who could not manage solid food, with the spirit added as a stimulant in the medical sense then current rather than for pleasure. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to promote its chocolate and cocoa, is otherwise a thoroughly commercial general cookbook, and its chafing-dish chapter reflects the fashion for tableside cookery in middle-class American homes around the turn of the century he device for making a light supper or after-theatre snack in the parlour. That a raw-egg cordial appears among the rarebits and creamed oysters is a reminder of how recently the invalid tray and the entertaining table shared a repertoire.