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Brunswick Eggnogg
One fresh egg, half a tablespoonful of sugar, and half a glass of finely chopped ice. Shake well and strain. Serve in tall glass with a little nutmeg on top.
Egg Lemonade No. I Beat the white of one egg very stiff with one tablespoonful of sugar. Add the juice of one lemon and one glass of ice water. Mix well. Egg Lemonade No. 2 Beat the whites and yolks of two eggs separately. Mix the juice of two lemons, four tablespoonfuls of sugar, and four cups of ice-cold water. Add the eggs and shake well. Serve while foaming.
Egg Lemonade No. 3 Mix the juice of one lemon with sufficient sugar to sweeten and drop in one whole egg. Add a little chopped ice, and fill up the glass with Apollinaris or Vichy. Shake briskly until the ingredients are well blended.
These are temperance-era soda-fountain drinks: whole raw eggs shaken with sugar, citrus and ice and drunk immediately. The raw egg is the whole substance of the drink and it is never heated, which is why the recipes cannot be recommended as written.
- Why the cautionEvery one of these four drinks depends on an uncooked egg going straight into the glass. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella enteritidis both on the shell and within the white and yolk, and neither ice, sugar, lemon juice nor carbonated water reduces that risk. Nothing here reaches a temperature that would kill the organism. If you want an egg drink, use a current recipe built around pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Who is most at riskThe hazard is not evenly distributed. Children, people over 65, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised are the groups for whom raw-egg beverages are specifically advised against, and these drinks were historically pressed on exactly those people as invalid food.
- "One glass" and "a glass of ice water"An unqualified glass at a soda fountain of this period is usually taken as a tumbler of roughly 8 fluid ounces, though the measure is genuinely loose; Egg Lemonade No. 2, which calls for four cups of water to two eggs, is a pitcher for several people rather than a single serving.
- "Half a glass of finely chopped ice"Fountain ice was shaved or chipped from a block, much finer than modern cubes, so it chilled and diluted fast in a shaker. A modern cocktail shaker filled with cubes behaves quite differently.
- Apollinaris and VichyBoth are naturally carbonated mineral waters, German and French respectively, sold everywhere in the period as digestive drinks. Any sparkling mineral water stands in for them; Vichy is the more strongly mineral, faintly saline of the two.
- "Shake well and strain"The straining is not decoration. Shaking a whole egg with chipped ice leaves shards and stringy albumen, and the drink was strained into a fresh tall glass so it arrived smooth and foaming.
- An eggnog without the nogDespite the name, no spirit appears in the Brunswick recipe. In this book that is the point rather than an omission.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the substantial literature of American temperance drink books, which set out to prove that a bar or soda fountain could serve something interesting without alcohol. Egg drinks were central to that argument: the whole raw egg gave body, foam and a reputation for nourishment, and eggnogg, egg phosphates and egg lemonades were fountain staples well into the twentieth century. Eggs beaten into wine or milk have a much older pedigree as invalid cookery, and the raw-egg drink was widely prescribed for the convalescent, the thin and the overworked, which is why so many of these formulas read like medicine rather than refreshment. The name "Brunswick" attaches itself to a great many nineteenth-century American dishes and drinks without a documented origin in any one of them, and it is best treated as a house or fountain label rather than a geographical claim. The two named waters, Apollinaris and Vichy, were imported brands prominent enough in the period that a bartender could use them as generic terms for fizz.