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Albuminized Orange
1 egg white juice 1 orange sugar Add orange juice sweetened to taste to egg white and beat well. Chill on ice and serve cold.
This is a raw-egg drink prescribed for the sick, and that combination is precisely why it cannot be recommended now.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white is beaten and chilled, and nothing in the method brings it above refrigerator temperature. Salmonella in shell eggs is a surface and occasionally an internal contaminant; orange juice is acidic but nowhere near acidic enough, or given enough time, to reduce a bacterial load.
- The intended eater is the wrong eaterInvalid cookery was aimed at convalescents, infants and the very old — exactly the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. A dish that might be a tolerable gamble for a healthy adult is not one here.
- "Albuminized" explainedAlbumen is egg white, and albuminized drinks were a family of nineteenth-century sickroom preparations — albuminized milk, water, lemonade — built on the belief that raw white supplied easily assimilated protein without taxing the stomach. The word almost always signals raw white.
- No cooked version is implied hereBeating raw white into cold juice is the entire technique; there is no stage that could simply be extended or heated to make it safe. If you want an orange drink enriched with egg, use a current recipe built around pasteurized egg product or a cooked custard base.
- Chilling is not a safeguard"Chill on ice" slows bacterial growth but kills nothing, and a glass may well have stood at the bedside for some time before it was drunk.
Invalid cookery commonly occupied its own chapter in general cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and raw egg white was one of its foundations. The reasoning was nutritional in a pre-vitamin sense: albumen was understood to be pure, concentrated nourishment that required little digestive effort, so it was slipped into milk, water, beef tea, wine and citrus juice for patients who could not or would not eat. Orange juice added flavor, and the beating produced a light froth that went down easily. The whole genre rests on a food-safety picture that did not yet exist heonellosysis onellosis — the link between shell eggs and salmonellosis was not well characterized until much later — which is why these preparations, once considered the gentlest thing in the house, are now the ones most firmly set aside.