Home › Beverages › Cocoa Egg-nog
Cocoa Egg-nog
1 egg white, beaten stiff 1 teaspoon sugar 1/4 cup cold water 1 teaspoon cocoa 3/4 cup milk few grains salt Mix sugar, cocoa and salt; add water and cook 5 minutes. Chill; add to egg white. Add cold milk to one-half of mixture. Serve in a glass with remaining mixture on top. One serving.
The cocoa syrup here is cooked, but the egg white is not — it goes into the glass raw and is never heated afterward.
- Raw egg white is the problemThe beaten white is folded into an already chilled syrup and then into cold milk, so nothing in the finished drink ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs can carry it inside the white and yolk, not merely on the shell, and beating does nothing to it.
- Chilling makes it worse, not betterChilling does not make it safe -- The recipe cools the syrup before the egg goes in, so the white is never exposed to heat at any stage. Cold storage slows bacterial growth but kills nothing, and the drink may stand at serving temperature while the second half is spooned on top.
- Who it was aimed atBeverages like this were pressed on children, invalids and convalescents — precisely the people for whom an egg-borne infection is most dangerous. If you want a cocoa egg-nog, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg.
- On the cocoa stepThe five-minute cooking of cocoa, sugar, salt and water is a syrup technique worth knowing in general: brief cooking with liquid is generally held to disperse the cocoa and take off the raw, dry taste. Modern chocolate-syrup methods use the same step.
- YieldOne serving, as stated. The measured liquid comes to about a cup before the beaten white is folded in.
Egg-nog in American cookery began as a spirituous drink, and by the late nineteenth century a plain "nourishing" egg drink made with milk and no liquor was widely recommended for the sickroom and for children. This cocoa version belongs to that second line, and reflects both the availability of finely milled breakfast cocoa in tins and a dietetic enthusiasm for eggs and milk as concentrated "building foods."