Egg Wine
INGREDIENTS for glass for i person.-1 egg, 1 tablespoonful and glass of cold water, 1 glass of sherry, sugar and grated nutmeg to taste.
Beat the egg, mixing with it a tablespoonful of cold water: make the wine-andwater hot, but not boiling; pour it on the egg, stirring all the time. Add sufficient lump sugar to sweeten the mixture, and a little grated nutmeg; put all into a very clean saucepan, set it on a gentle fire, and stir the contents one way until they thicken, but do not allow them to boil.
Serve in a glass with sippets of toasted bread or plain crisp biscuits. When the egg is not warmed, the mixture will be found easier of digestion, but it is not so pleasant a drink.
A sick-room drink from the invalid-cookery tradition: essentially a thin sherry custard served hot in a glass. The whole of the technique is temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe egg thickens the wine at roughly 160-170F and curdles into grainy threads by about 180F. Keep the pan barely steaming over the lowest heat and pull it the moment it coats the spoon.
- What a "glass" meansThe measure is a wine glass, which in Victorian recipe books is about 2 fl oz, not a modern tumbler. So roughly 2 fl oz sherry and 2 fl oz water, plus the extra tablespoon of cold water beaten into the egg.
- Warm the wine first, off the eggHeating the sherry and water separately and pouring it slowly onto the beaten egg while stirring is tempering. Skipping it and putting a cold egg straight into the pan gives you scrambled egg in wine.
- The unwarmed versionThe closing note offers the mixture with the egg left essentially uncooked. That is a raw egg never brought to a safe temperature, with the usual salmonella risk; if you want it that way, use pasteurised egg.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was simply refined white sugar broken from a cone or block. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; a teaspoon or two is enough for this quantity.
- SherryA dry to medium amontillado or oloroso suits it better than cream sherry, which will make it cloying once sugared. Avoid anything labelled cooking sherry.
- "Stir one way"Kitchen lore rather than chemistry; stirring direction has no effect on setting. Steady gentle stirring does, since it keeps the egg from setting in lumps against the pan base.
- SippetsSmall pieces of bread, cut as narrow fingers or triangles and toasted (sometimes fried), served dry alongside for dipping.
- YieldOne glass, for one person, and it does not keep or reheat. Make it to order.
Egg wine belongs to the section of Victorian household manuals given over to invalid cookery, the food prepared for the sick and convalescent at a time when nursing happened at home and beef tea, gruel, arrowroot and wine whey were treated as something close to medicine. Its ancestors are the caudle and the posset, warm spiced drinks of wine or ale thickened with egg that go back centuries in English cookery and were long given to women after childbirth as well as to the ill. The fragment of a line at the top of the entry, "for one that is three or four days old", is the tail of the preceding egg article, and reads as the end of a boiling-times instruction. That the recipe carefully notes the unheated version is easier to digest but less pleasant tells you the priority here was getting nourishment into someone with no appetite, by whatever route worked.