Home › Fruit Drinks and Cider › Cider and Egg
Cider and Egg
Beat one egg and pour it into a tall glass, one third full of cracked ice. Add one teaspoonful of powdered sugar, the juice of one lemon, and fill glass with cider. Mix well, sprinkle nutmeg on top, and serve.
This is a raw-egg flip of the temperance sort, and the egg is the problem: nothing in the glass cooks it, and nothing in it is strong enough to make it safe. The notes below explain the terms and why the drink fails as written.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes into the glass beaten and is served immediately. Salmonella in or on a shell egg is killed by heat or by commercial pasteurisation, neither of which happens here. If you want a drink of this style today, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or a cooked base.
- The cider does not protect itIn a spirituous flip the alcohol may offer some slight inhibition, though not reliably. In a temperance collection the "cider" is presumably sweet unfermented apple cider, so the glass is sugar, fruit acid and raw protein held at drinking temperature by melting ice ot a hostile medium.
- Lemon juice is not a treatmentThe juice of one lemon in a tall glass of cider brings the pH down only modestly and works slowly at best. Acid marinades and citrus dressings are not a substitute for pasteurisation, and the drink is consumed within a minute of mixing.
- Cracked iceIce chipped from a block with a pick or hammer into irregular pieces, coarser than crushed; sizes varied by bar and by hand.
- Powdered sugarIn American bar books of this era, powdered sugar means finely ground sugar sold for dissolving in cold drinks — closest today to superfine or caster sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar on the shelf now.
- "Cider" in an American temperance bookPresumably fresh-pressed sweet cider, unfermented and, at the period, unpasteurised. Modern supermarket cider is heat-treated or UV-treated, which is a real improvement over the original supply, but it does nothing for the egg.
- YieldOne tall glass, roughly 10 to 12 oz, served at once before the egg and cider separate.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of American drink books written to furnish a bar's repertoire without the bar's liquor: the water wagon was the vehicle you climbed onto when you swore off drink, and the phrase survives in "fall off the wagon." The recipe itself is a flip in everything but the spirit — the flip, generally traced to seventeenth-century English tavern practice, was originally ale, often with rum, sweetened and heated with a hot iron loggerhead, with egg a later addition, and by the nineteenth century American bartenders had turned it into a cold shaken drink of egg, sugar and a base liquor, dusted with nutmeg. Swapping sweet cider for the brandy or sherry kept the ritual and the nutmeg while satisfying the pledge, and the raw egg carried its own respectability: eggs beaten into cider, milk or wine were widely regarded as a strengthening food for invalids and working men, which is why they turn up in temperance collections as freely as in bar guides.