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Egg Milk-Shake
1 egg 1 teaspoon sugar Grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon vanilla Milk to fill glass Beat the egg separately and then together; add sugar and flavoring, using a larger quantity if desired. Turn into a glass; , using a larger quantity if desired. Turn into a glass; fill the glass with milk; shake well and grate a little nutmeg over the top.
This is delicious when frozen. Make a custard of the egg, milk and sugar, using an extra quantity of sugar. When almost frozen add the flavoring and an equal quantity of sweetened whipped cream.
A soda-fountain style drink from the era when a raw egg beaten into milk was considered a tonic. The ingredient list has lost its quantities, and the drink as described is never heated.
- Raw egg, never cookedThe egg is beaten, mixed with cold milk and served immediately. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present in the shell and occasionally inside the egg itself. This was a standard household drink for invalids and children, the two groups now considered most at risk from it.
- Cold milk in 1917Cold milk -- the milk used for a drink like this may well have been raw rather than pasteurised. Combined with uncooked egg there is no step in the recipe that makes either safe.
- The frozen variationThe second half turns the same mixture into a custard, which does involve cooking, but no temperature or time is given and the flavouring and whipped cream go in during freezing. Without a stated custard temperature there is no way to know the egg was ever brought up to a safe point. If you want a frozen egg custard, use a current recipe with a thermometer target.
- Missing quantitiesThe opening of the ingredient list is gone, so the number of eggs and the amount of sugar are unknown; only the vanilla (1 teaspoon) survives. One egg per glass would be a plausible proportion, but the text as it stands does not say.
- Grated nutmegFreshly grated whole nutmeg was a common finish for milk drinks and eggnogs. Pre-ground nutmeg loses aroma comparatively quickly, which is one reason grating fresh is preferred.
Egg drinks like this one sat on the border between refreshment and medicine for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An egg beaten into milk, sweetened and spiced with nutmeg, was commonly recommended for convalescents and anyone thought to need building up, and closely related mixtures with spirits added were sold as eggnog. Commercial soda fountains sold egg drinks by the glass, shaken in a metal tumbler; whether this particular domestic version was taken from a fountain formula is not something the recipe or the book tells us. Nutmeg as the finishing spice echoes the older tradition of spiced possets and caudles, warm sweetened milk-and-egg drinks of long standing in English cookery. The general confidence in raw egg persisted in print until industrial egg production and better understanding of Salmonella in the later twentieth century made it untenable.