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Hot Cherry Egg
Break an egg into a shaker, add four tablespoonfuls of cherry juice or syrup and one teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Shake well and strain into a glass adding hot water. Decorate with cherries and a slice of lemon.
This is a raw-egg drink of the temperance-bar type, and the hot water it is finished with does nothing to make it safe. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rebuild it.
- The egg is never cookedThe whole egg goes into the shaker cold and is then diluted with hot water. The recipe gives neither the quantity nor the temperature of that water, and nothing in the sequence holds the egg long enough or hot enough to kill Salmonella, which is the specific risk in shell eggs.
- Shaking makes it worseAerating the raw egg spreads any surface or interior contamination evenly through the whole drink. The strain step removes the chalazae and shell fragments, not bacteria.
- Who drank itEgg drinks of this kind were promoted as a nourishing tonic, and are commonly associated with children, convalescents and the elderly. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw egg is least advisable now.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg, or a cooked-custard base. We are not going to supply timings that imply the original method is sound.
- Reading the quantitiesFour tablespoonfuls of cherry juice is a quarter cup, and the "powdered sugar" of the period usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. The amount of hot water is left entirely to the bartender.
This belongs to the American soda-fountain repertoire, part of a temperance tradition of "soft" drinks that long predates 1920. The recipe is a temperance version of the egg flip, a drink that in its older form combined egg, sugar and spirits or ale and was often heated with a hot iron loggerhead thrust into the mug. Strip out the liquor and you are left with egg, sugar, flavoring and hot water, and the fountain man reached for whatever bottled fruit syrup he already had for sodas, cherry being among the most common. The garnish of cherries and a lemon slice is pure fountain showmanship, meant to make an abstemious drink look as considered as a cocktail.