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Orange Egg Cordial
Prepare as Egg Cordial, omitting wine and cream, and using the juice of one orange. 1 egg white
This is a two-line variation that depends entirely on the parent recipe, Egg Cordial, a few pages earlier in the same chapter. As written it is a raw-egg drink with no cooking step at any point, which is why it should not be made from this text.
- Why it failsWhat this text specifies is a raw egg white and the juice of an orange, with no cooking step anywhere in it. Nothing here is brought to a temperature that would kill Salmonella on or in a shell egg, and orange juice is not acidic or concentrated enough to do the job either.
- The wine is what has been removedWhat has been removed -- The parent recipe's wine and cream are both omitted here, leaving the drink built on juice and egg white alone.
- Who it was aimed atWho it was likely aimed at -- Cordials of this kind are generally associated with invalids, convalescents and children -- exactly the people least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. If you want the drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or a cooked base.
- Cordial, in this bookNot a sweet liqueur. Here the word appears to mean a small restorative drink lightened with beaten egg.
- YieldOne egg white, the juice of one orange: a single glass, one serving.
Egg cordials, egg nogs, egg lemonades and "egg flips" appear in the sickroom sections of American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century into the early twentieth, when a beaten raw egg was regarded as concentrated nourishment for anyone too weak to eat solid food. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate makers, and is best known for its cocoa and confectionery pages. Its brevity is typical of the era's house style, where the reader was expected to work from the parent recipe and adjust. Raw-egg drinks of this kind fell out of use as the risk of Salmonella in shell eggs became widely recognised in the later twentieth century, which made them a poor idea for precisely the sick and the young they had been intended to feed.