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Eggnog
1 egg 2 tablespoons wine, whiskey, or 1 teaspoon sugar salt brandy 1 cup cream Beat white of egg until stiff; add beaten cream and liquor, then well-beaten yolk mixed with sugar and salt. Milk or hot water may be substituted for the cream, and the yolk and white may be beaten together just slightly if a foamy eggnog is disliked.
The text is a single-serving drink built on a raw egg, and that is the problem with it. The notes below explain the recipe rather than adapt it.
- The egg is never cookedWhite, yolk and cream are beaten cold and served immediately. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and shell eggs from a modern supermarket are not sterile inside.
- The spirit does not make it safeTwo tablespoons of wine or whiskey against a cup of cream and a whole egg is a very low proportion of alcohol, and it is drunk at once rather than aged. The folk belief that liquor sterilises an eggnog rests on heavily spirited batches held for weeks in the cold, not on a single glass mixed to order.
- The hot-water variant is not a cook step"Milk or hot water may be substituted for the cream" is about texture and economy, not pasteurisation. Water poured into a bowl of beaten egg loses heat instantly and holds nothing at temperature.
- Who is most at riskRaw-egg drinks are specifically hazardous for young children, pregnant women, adults over sixty-five and anyone immunocompromised. If you want eggnog, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurised eggs.
- Reading the ingredient listThe column has collapsed in transcription. It resolves to: 1 egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, salt (no quantity given), 2 tablespoons wine, whiskey or brandy, and 1 cup cream. No yield is stated, though the quantities suggest a single large glass.
- "Beaten cream"Here this most likely means cream whipped only until it thickens, in contrast to the white, which the recipe explicitly says to beat until stiff. That, plus the separately beaten white, is what produces the foamy body the recipe assumes; the final line offers a flat version for drinkers who dislike froth.
- Why it sits under Chafing Dish DelicaciesNothing here touches the flame. Chafing-dish chapters of this period often extend beyond dishes actually cooked over the lamp to things prepared in company, and a drink whisked up in front of guests would sit comfortably in that repertoire.
Eggnog descends from the English posset and sack-possets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hot drinks of milk or cream curdled with wine or ale and enriched with eggs; the shift to spirits, and to a cold version, is generally traced to the American colonies, where rum, whiskey and brandy were cheaper and more plentiful than fortified wine. The name itself is usually explained as "egg" plus "noggin," a small wooden cup, though that reading is traditional rather than proven. Its appearance in a chafing-dish chapter reflects the fashion of the 1890s and 1900s for cooking in company: the chafing dish was a young-hostess accessory, sold with its own literature, and a book issued under the name of the Lowney chocolate company of Boston was pitched squarely at that market of informal, small-scale entertaining.