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Albumenized Milk
Shake thoroughly the white of one egg with one half cup of milk.
This is a two-ingredient sickroom drink from the era before egg-borne illness was understood, and it is built on raw egg white that never gets near a safe temperature. The notes below explain the problem rather than fix it.
- Raw egg white is the whole difficultySalmonella can be present inside an intact, clean shell, not merely on the outside, and nothing in this preparation heats the egg. Shaking a raw white into milk gives the drink no kill step at all.
- Who it was made forAlbumenized milk was fed to invalids, convalescents, infants and the elderly — precisely the groups most vulnerable to invasive salmonellosis. The intended audience makes the risk worse, not academic.
- The milk of 1919 was not the milk of todayThe milk of the period was not the milk of today -- Commercial pasteurization was still patchy when this book was printed, and a great deal of household milk was raw. Recipes of this kind carried a tuberculosis and undulant-fever risk on top of the egg.
- RefrigerationA shaken egg-and-milk drink left standing at room temperature is a good growth medium. This recipe says nothing about chilling or prompt consumption.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized liquid egg white or a pasteurized-in-shell egg. Do not adapt the version above.
- Reading the measurementsFor the record, a half cup here is the modern 4 fl oz. The recipe gives no indication of egg size.
Albumen is simply the old chemical name for egg white, and albumenized milk belonged to the nineteenth-century invalid-cookery tradition, in which food for the sick was judged by how much nitrogenous "nourishment" it could deliver in a form the stomach need not work on. Egg white was prized as nearly pure protein and, unlike the yolk, was thought bland and unirritating; drinks like this one, along with beef tea, barley water and koumiss, filled whole chapters of household manuals and nursing texts.