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Egg Sour
Put in a small glass two or three pieces of ice, one tablespoonful of powdered sugar, one egg, and the juice of one lemon. Shake well and serve with a little nutmeg on top.
A one-glass drink from a Prohibition-era book of soft beverages. The technique is straightforward; the problem is the egg, which is never heated at any point.
- Why this one failsA whole raw egg is shaken with ice, sugar and lemon juice and drunk immediately. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and lemon juice does not reliably pasteurize an egg. If you want an egg sour today, use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs.
- The acid mythCitrus is sometimes assumed to make a raw egg safe. It does not. The pH of a shaken egg-and-lemon mixture is nowhere near low enough, nor is the contact time long enough, to make a contaminated egg safe.
- "Powdered sugar"In American cookbooks of this period the term generally meant sugar ground fine but unadulterated, closest to today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which would cloud and thicken the drink.
- "A small glass"Probably something on the order of a small sour or wine glass. One egg, one lemon and a tablespoon of sugar amount to a single serving; the original gives no yield.
- Shaking, in period terms"Shake well" here means hard and briefly, so the egg emulsifies into a foam and the drink stays cold. Note that the recipe directs the ice and ingredients into the glass itself and says nothing about straining.
- The nutmegFreshly grated is a different ingredient from pre-ground. Nutmeg was a common garnish on egg drinks of this era, flips and nogs included, and it is the one element of the recipe that transfers unchanged.
"Sour" names a family of drinks built on spirit, lemon juice and sugar, and by the late nineteenth century bar manuals were adding whole eggs to the formula for body and foam, alongside flips, nogs and egg lemonades. This version comes from a collection of nonalcoholic drinks issued as national prohibition approached in the United States, a book that took the standard bar repertoire and simply removed the liquor, keeping the glassware, the shaking and the nutmeg. The result shows how much of a cocktail's identity lived in its texture and garnish rather than its alcohol: without the spirit, an egg sour is still recognizably a sour. Raw egg in drinks was unremarkable in domestic cookery of the period, when eggs were often held up as invalid food; the industrial egg supply and the modern understanding of Salmonella both came later.