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Grape Eggnogg
Beat one fresh egg until very light, add one third cup of grape juice, one teaspoonful of powdered sugar, and stir briskly. Then add one quarter of a cup of milk, stir again, pour into a glass with cracked ice, and sprinkle with nutmeg.
This is a raw-egg drink with nothing in it that would make the egg safe: no cooking, no custard stage, and — because this is a temperance book — none of the spirit that traditional eggnog relied on. The rest of the notes explain why that matters and what the original quantities mean.
- The raw egg is the problemThe whole egg goes into the glass uncooked and is served immediately over ice, so it is never brought to the 160F at which Salmonella in a shell egg is reliably killed. Nothing else in the formula — grape juice, sugar, milk, nutmeg — has any antimicrobial effect at these proportions.
- No alcohol, no marginClassic eggnogs carried a substantial measure of brandy, rum or whisky, and there is some evidence that nog aged for weeks at high proof becomes inhospitable to bacteria; freshly mixed spirituous nog offers no such protection. A temperance version replaces the spirit with unfermented grape juice in any case.
- Raw milk in periodThe quarter cup of milk would, at the time this was written, quite possibly have been unpasteurised, adding a second uncontrolled risk to a drink that is assembled cold and drunk at once.
- Held cold, not held safeCracked ice chills the glass but does not sterilise anything. If you want an eggnogg, use a current recipe built on a cooked or pasteurised base.
- Reading the measuresA third of a cup of grape juice and a quarter cup of milk are standard modern volumes; "powdered sugar" in books of this vintage usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. The yield is one glass.
Books like this one appeared in quantity in the decades before national Prohibition, when temperance organisations set out to prove that the saloon had no monopoly on a good drink. Unfermented grape juice was the flagship of that campaign — commercially pasteurised bottled juice had been available since the late nineteenth century and was widely promoted as a wholesome, respectable substitute for wine, including at the communion table. Eggnog was an obvious target for conversion: it was a familiar restorative, often given to invalids and children as much as drunk for pleasure, and its bulk came from egg, milk and sugar rather than from spirit. Swapping brandy for grape juice let the compiler keep the nutmeg, the cracked ice and the whole comfortable ritual of the drink while striking out the one ingredient the movement objected to.