Home › Invalid Drinks › Egg Tea
Egg Tea
Beat the white and yolk of one egg separately. While beating the yolk add one level teaspoonful of sugar. When well beaten, mix, and add a cupful of boiling water. Season with nutmeg.
This is a raw-egg drink with hot water poured over it, and it was intended for exactly the people who should not be given one. The notes below explain the problem and the vocabulary of the period rather than offering a working method.
- The egg is never cookedA cupful of boiling water stirred into one beaten egg is diluted and cooled by the egg itself and by the cold cup, and the mixture is not held at any temperature for any length of time. Nothing here reliably brings the egg to the 160F at which Salmonella is destroyed.
- Who it was made for"Invalid drinks" were served to the sick, the elderly, the very young and the recovering — the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become severe. The intended audience makes the risk worse, not lighter.
- Eggs of 1900 versus nowEggs then versus now -- Period writers generally treated a fresh egg as safe in itself. Modern shell eggs are handled as a potential source of enteric bacteria on both shell and interior, which is why current guidance for anything uncooked calls for pasteurized egg. Consult a current recipe if you want a drink of this kind.
- "Cupful"In American books of this period a cupful is usually taken as 8 fluid ounces, about 240 ml, the measure promoted by the domestic-science schools, though usage was not yet uniform across all books.
- Separating and beatingThe white and yolk were beaten apart so the drink would foam rather than sit as a slick of yolk under water; sugar was worked into the yolk to break it down. The same separating-and-beating habit appears in egg-nog recipes of the period.
- NutmegGrated nutmeg was a common finish on warm milk-and-egg preparations of the era, and was thought mildly settling to the stomach. In quantity nutmeg is genuinely intoxicating and unpleasant; the old books call for no more than a dusting.
Egg drinks were a staple of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery: they were cheap, took no chewing, and were believed to carry concentrated nourishment to a patient who could not face solid food. Many household manuals of the period carry a run of them -- egg nog, egg lemonade, egg gruel, egg wine, and this one, in which the "tea" is not tea at all but simply hot water, the name apparently borrowed because the drink was taken from a cup like one. Some compilers offered such drinks as alternatives to the brandy or sherry that older recipes for egg flip and egg wine took for granted. The confidence in these drinks faded as bacteriology advanced, and raw egg came to be treated as a possible vector rather than a tonic.