Home › Egg Drinks › Coffee Eggnogg
Coffee Eggnogg
Beat one egg with one teaspoonful of sugar, a pinch of salt, and two thirds cup of clear coffee. Shake well before serving.
A two-ingredient drink from the era of soda-fountain substitutes, but one built on a raw egg that never meets heat. That single fact is what stands between this page and a glass in your hand.
- The egg is never cookedThe recipe gives no heating step and no temperature for the coffee, so the egg cannot be assumed to reach a safe temperature; "clear" appears to mean strained and taken without milk, and it may well have been served cold. A whole raw shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside the egg and not merely on the shell, and neither shaking nor sugar reduces it.
- Why the coffee cannot be trusted to do the workEgg proteins need sustained heat to be safe, in the range used for stirred custards. Two thirds of a cup of coffee beaten into one egg cannot be relied on to hold that heat long enough, whatever its starting temperature. This is not a cooked eggnog base.
- Who is most at riskChildren, pregnant women, adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised should not be served raw-egg drinks at all. Period cookbooks routinely prescribed exactly this preparation for invalids and convalescents, which is precisely the population that should avoid it.
- "Clear coffee"Most likely brewed coffee strained free of grounds and taken without milk or cream, rather than any modern clarified or cold-brew concentrate. Two thirds of a cup is a little over 5 fl oz, so the drink is essentially one egg per small cup.
- "Shake well"The direction implies mixing in some closed vessel before serving. It is a mixing instruction, not a safety step.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg, or a cooked-custard base. Do not adapt the text above.
Books like this one borrowed freely from the sickroom as well as the bar. Egg drinks had long been considered strengthening food rather than indulgence, the raw egg beaten into coffee, milk or sherry being a standard nineteenth-century way of feeding someone with no appetite. The name eggnog is generally traced to the older English "nog" for strong ale, and the drink's early forms were alcoholic; a temperance collection keeps the egg and sugar, drops the spirit, and substitutes coffee for the kick. What the recipe records, apart from a period taste for sweetened egg, is how little suspicion attached to a raw egg before the late-twentieth-century understanding of internally contaminated eggs changed the calculation entirely.