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Glasgow Eggnogg
Beat one egg until very light and put in a tall glass with two teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar and the juice of one lemon. Fill up the glass with very cold ginger ale. Mix well before serving.
This is a raw-egg drink: the egg is beaten, dressed with sugar and lemon, topped with ginger ale and served immediately, with no heat at any stage. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain the specific problem rather than offering a workaround.
- The egg is never cookedNothing in the method raises the egg above refrigerator temperature. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis, which is not only a surface contaminant but can be present inside an intact, clean, unbroken egg. Lemon juice and sugar do not reduce that risk in the minutes between mixing and drinking.
- No alcohol to lean onTraditional eggnogs often included a substantial dose of spirit, and spirit-heavy mixtures held for a long period have been shown to suppress bacterial growth. Whatever limited protection that offered is absent here: this version is built on ginger ale.
- Served to the wrong peopleEgg drinks in books of this period were often recommended to invalids, convalescents and children as nourishment, though this recipe says nothing about who it is for. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg beverage carries the most serious consequences.
- Acid is not a treatmentLemon juice does not pasteurise egg. Any thickening or change in appearance the acid produces should not be read as cooking.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe written around commercially pasteurised egg product, and follow its handling instructions rather than these.
- Reading the original"Powdered sugar" in books of this period generally meant finely ground sugar that dissolves in cold liquid, closer to today's caster or superfine than to icing sugar with its cornstarch. The quantities make a single tall glass; the recipe gives no volume, so the finished amount depends on the glass.
Drinks that borrowed the shape and vocabulary of the bar while leaving out the liquor were a recognisable genre, and this reads as one of them: an eggnogg in name, but built on ginger ale rather than brandy or rum. Ginger ale was widely bottled and cheap in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and fizzy enough to give a soft drink some of the bite drinkers expected. Egg beaten into a cold sweetened drink was also common in invalid feeding of the period, when a raw egg was regarded as concentrated strength for anyone off their food, an idea that outlasted medical support for it. The "Glasgow" label carries no documented Scottish origin for this formula, and is probably better read as flavour than as provenance.