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Albumenized Water
1 cup cold water White of 1 egg 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon sugar Put the water, egg, lemon juice and sugar in a covered jar and shake until all the ingredients are thoroughly blended. Stand on the ice and shake again just before serving.
This is a sickroom beverage from the era when raw egg white was considered the gentlest food a weak stomach could take. The whole point of the recipe is that nothing is cooked, and that is precisely why it cannot be recommended now.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe egg white is shaken cold and served cold; it is never brought to any temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs remain a recognized vehicle for salmonellosis, and neither the lemon juice nor the chilling does anything meaningful to the bacterial load.
- Intended for exactly the wrong drinkersAlbumen water was given to infants, the elderly, convalescents and fever patients — the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. A drink of raw egg aimed at that audience is the least defensible version of the risk.
- The acid does not sterilizeA teaspoon of lemon juice in a cup of water is far too dilute to act as a preservative or a kill step. Whatever its purpose, it is not a safety measure.
- "Stand on the ice"The phrase points to an ice box, and the instruction is about serving temperature, not safety. Cold storage slows bacterial growth; it does not remove what is already present in a raw egg.
- If you want the effectFor a clear, lightly sweetened invalid drink, use a current recipe — a plain lemon-and-water barley drink or an oral rehydration formula does the same job without raw egg. Pasteurized egg products exist, but the sensible course here is to make something else.
Albumen or "albumenized" water was a fixture of Anglo-American invalid cookery from the later nineteenth century into the early twentieth, appearing in nursing manuals and household books alongside beef tea, barley water and whey. The reasoning was ordinary nineteenth-century dietetics: albumen was held to be among the most easily assimilated forms of protein, and a patient with typhoid, gastritis or a high fever who could not keep down milk or broth might still tolerate egg white suspended in cold water. Lemon and sugar were there to make it drinkable. The practice faded as hospital and pediatric feeding was reorganized around measured formulas, and as the link between raw shell eggs and salmonellosis became documented over the course of the twentieth century. What survives is a useful record of how narrow the sickroom diet once was, and how much faith was placed in the egg.