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Egg Lemonade
2 lemons 2 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar 3 cups water 1 cup cracked ice Break the eggs and beat the whites and yolks separately. Mix the lemons, sugar, water and ice as for lemonade; add the eggs; pour rapidly back and forth from one pitcher to another and serve before the froth disappears.
This is a raw-egg drink: the eggs are beaten and poured into cold lemonade, never heated at any stage. That places it outside what we can recommend making from the text as written.
- Why the cautionBoth the white and the yolk go into the glass uncooked and are served immediately. Salmonella in shell eggs is an internal contamination, not just a shell issue, so no amount of washing or rapid pouring addresses it. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 160F at which it would be safe.
- Who is most at riskRaw egg drinks are specifically discouraged for children, pregnant women, adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised. The recipe predates any refrigeration standard for eggs and the recognition of intact shell eggs as a route of infection.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or pasteurized liquid egg white, which are sold precisely for uncooked applications. Follow that source's proportions and handling rather than adapting these.
- On the odd placementFiled under Canning and Preserving, though it preserves nothing.
- Reading the quantitiesFour tablespoons of sugar to three cups of water and two lemons is a lightly sweetened lemonade by modern taste. The cup of cracked ice is listed separately from the three cups of water.
- The pouringPassing the mixture between two pitchers is a pre-blender aeration technique, the same motion used for chocolate and for cocktails thrown between tins. It produces a coarse, short-lived foam, which is why the recipe insists on serving before it collapses.
Egg lemonade belongs to a large family of American egg drinks that includes eggnog, the egg phosphate and the sherry flip, all popular at soda fountains and in domestic kitchens through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Raw egg was regarded as a strengthening food, and beverages built on it were routinely prescribed for invalids, convalescents and people thought to need building up; cookbooks of the period often carry a whole chapter of "drinks for the sick" in which egg, milk, beef tea and wine do the work. The pitcher-to-pitcher pour is the household version of what a fountain clerk did with a shaker, and it survives today mainly in the throwing technique used for a few cocktails. The dish reads as harmless in its own time because commercial egg handling, refrigeration and the identification of Salmonella enteritidis as a hazard in intact shell eggs all came later.