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Egg Grape Juice
To one well-beaten egg, add the juice of one lime, and one teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Pour into a tall glass half full of cracked ice, and fill with grape juice. Stir well, and serve very cold.
This is a raw-egg drink: the egg is beaten into acid and cold juice and never heated at any point. That single fact governs everything below.
- The egg is never cookedNothing in the method brings the egg above refrigerator temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella inside an intact, clean shell, which was not understood when this was written. A drink built on one raw egg and served ice-cold offers no step that reduces that risk.
- Lime juice does not make it safeThe juice of one lime, diluted in a tall glass of grape juice, does not lower the pH far enough or fast enough to be treated as a kill step. Acidity in a cold beverage slows bacterial growth; it does not sanitise.
- Cold service works against you here"Serve very cold" is good advice for flavour. Chilling only holds bacterial numbers where they are — anything present in the egg when it is cracked is still present in the glass.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written for pasteurized egg or egg-free foam. The proportions here are otherwise unremarkable and widely superseded.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which carries added cornstarch. The point was simply that it dissolve in a cold liquid.
- Grape juiceThis means unfermented bottled juice, typically Concord — dark, sweet and strongly foxy in flavour, quite unlike the pale grape juices sold alongside it today.
- Cracked iceIce was chipped from a block with a pick, giving irregular shards that chilled and diluted quickly. A tall glass "half full" of it means the finished drink was watered considerably by the time it was drunk.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance drink literature that flourished in the years before and during National Prohibition, when hotels, soda fountains and hostesses all needed something to put in a stemmed glass that was not liquor. Bottled unfermented grape juice was the flagship of that movement: pasteurised grape juice had been promoted since the late nineteenth century as a wine substitute, and it carried a strong association with abstinence — Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan famously served it at official dinners in place of wine. The egg here is doing the work alcohol and cream do elsewhere, giving body and a foam head so the glass reads as a proper mixed drink rather than juice. Raw egg was standard bar practice at the time, in flips, fizzes and "egg lemonades" alike, and was also thought nourishing; the invalid-cookery habit of beating an egg into a cold drink sat comfortably beside the saloon technique it was imitating.