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Egg Flip
Beat the white of one egg stiffly and sprinkle a few grains of white pepper on it. Pour one teacupful of boiling milk over the egg white, while stirring vigorously. Sweeten to taste and serve. The pepper prevents flatulency.
A one-cup sickroom drink that comes together in about three minutes. The technique is the whole recipe: everything depends on how the hot milk meets the beaten white.
- TeacupfulA teacup in this period is smaller than the modern 8 oz measuring cup; sources reckon it anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz. Take the proportion as roughly one egg white to half or three-quarters of a cup of milk.
- Pour slowly, stir constantlyThis is the hinge. Boiling milk hitting a stiff white all at once sets it into strings of cooked albumen. Add the milk in a thin stream while whisking hard, and the foam stays smooth and drinkable.
- Egg safetyThe milk cooks the white only partially, and a stiff foam insulates itself. Use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg whites if the drink is going to anyone elderly, pregnant, very young, or ill — for the audience this book had in mind.
- White pepperA few grains means exactly that. Anything more than a light dusting will dominate 6 oz of sweetened milk. The claim that it "prevents flatulency" is period digestive folklore with no basis; keep the pepper only if you like the aromatic edge.
- SweeteningSugar dissolves better if stirred into the hot milk before it meets the egg. A teaspoon or two is usually enough; grated nutmeg is a common addition to flips of this kind.
- The leftover yolkThe recipe uses the white alone. Save the yolk for a custard or hollandaise the same day rather than beating it in — the drink is meant to be light and foamy, and the yolk makes it heavy.
- Yield and servingOne serving, and it must go to the table at once. Left standing, the foam collapses and weeps a thin layer of milk.
An egg flip was originally a tavern drink: beaten egg, sugar and ale or spirits, said by tradition to have been "flipped" between two vessels, or thickened by plunging a red-hot loggerhead iron into the mug. What survives here is the frame with the alcohol removed. Hot beaten egg in milk had a second life quite apart from the tavern, as invalid cookery: it was one of the standard nourishing drinks offered to the sick and convalescent in nineteenth-century household manuals, cheap, quickly made, and easy to swallow. The confident note about pepper preventing flatulency is a fossil of the older humoral idea that warming spices corrected the cold, windy nature of milk and eggs traditional reasoning rather than anything demonstrated.