Egg Gruel

This is an invalid's drink from the era when raw egg beaten into hot liquid was standard sickroom nourishment. The method cannot bring the egg to a safe temperature, and the people it was made for were exactly those least able to withstand an infection.

• The egg is never cookedThe egg is never cooked to a verified temperature -- a cup of hot milk poured over a beaten raw egg may not reach, and certainly is not held at, the temperature needed to destroy Salmonella; how warm it ends up depends entirely on how hot the milk was. Nothing in the recipe returns it to heat, and it is served immediately.
• Intended for the vulnerableGruels of this kind were fed to the sick, the elderly, the convalescent and small children — the groups in whom salmonellosis is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. The intended audience is what makes this one worth flagging rather than shrugging at.
• Shell eggs then and nowCookery writing of the period generally treated a fresh egg as clean inside. Modern understanding of Salmonella enteritidis, which can be present within an intact, unblemished egg, removed that assumption.
• Beating in air makes it worse, not betterBeating in air does not help -- whipping the white to a foam gives the mixture more surface from which to lose heat, and the visible lightness that signalled quality does nothing to pasteurise it.
• If you want the drinkCustard-style hot egg drinks are still made, but only with pasteurized shell eggs or liquid egg product, or by cooking the mixture over heat to a measured temperature. Use a current recipe written on that basis rather than adapting this one.
• Terms in the original"Gruel" here means a thin drink, not the oat porridge the word usually implies. The grated nutmeg or lemon juice is flavouring only, and neither has any preservative or antimicrobial role at these quantities.