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Egg Lemonade
Put in shaker one fresh egg, one tablespoonful of sugar and the juice of half a lemon and two or three pieces of ice. Shake well until the egg is well blended with the other ingredients. Strain and fill up glass with soda or Seltzer water.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink, and the egg is never heated at any point. That single fact puts it outside what can be recommended today.
- The raw egg is the problemThe whole egg goes into the shaker and straight into the glass with nothing but lemon juice and cold soda water. Nothing in the procedure reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell.
- Lemon juice does not make it safeThe acid from half a lemon is diluted immediately by sugar, ice and a full glass of carbonated water. Acidity at that level does not reliably kill pathogens in the short time between shaking and drinking, and citrus is sometimes wrongly assumed to do the work of heat.
- Who it was served toEgg drinks were pressed on invalids, children and the elderly as a strengthening tonic. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg beverage carries the greatest consequence, which is worth knowing before treating this as a harmless period curiosity.
- Ice and holding timeThe recipe calls for only two or three pieces of ice and has the drink strained and the glass filled immediately, so it reads as something made and drunk on the spot. Any version mixed in advance and left standing sits in the temperature range where bacteria multiply fastest.
- If you want the drinkModern egg-based cocktails and fountain drinks are built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg. Follow a current recipe written for those products rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the original"Soda or Seltzer water" here means plain charged water from the fountain siphon, not a sweetened soft drink. The tablespoonful of sugar is doing all the sweetening, and it was dissolved by the shaking rather than by syrup.
Egg lemonade belongs to the soda fountain's long line of egg drinks -- egg phosphates, egg nogs and flips -- that draw on the nineteenth-century idea of the beverage as nourishment rather than refreshment. Soda fountains were commonly attached to drugstores, and a raw egg beaten into a glass was offered in much the same spirit as a tonic: something to build up a thin child or a convalescent. Collections of drinks containing no spirits gathered such recipes in quantity during the temperance years. The lemon-and-egg combination survived into the cocktail world as the sour and the flip, where the white contributes foam and body -- the same textural effect the shaker is producing here, minus the alcohol.