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Hot Egg Ginger
Break one egg into a shaker with two tablespoonfuls each of ginger syrup and grape juice and a little lemon juice. Shake well and strain into a glass. Add hot water and whipped cream. A little nutmeg or cinnamon may be added.
The drink is a raw-egg flip in the old saloon manner, with ginger syrup standing in for spirits. The egg is the problem: nothing in the method brings it anywhere near a safe temperature.
- The raw egg never cooksThe egg is shaken cold, strained, and then diluted with hot water in a glass. Water poured from a kettle into a cold glass containing egg, syrup, juice and cream lands far below the temperature and holding time needed to kill Salmonella, and the drink is consumed immediately. This is a raw egg beverage in effect, and it should not be made as written. If you want a hot egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Straining will not helpThe instruction to strain removes the chalaza and any shell fragments only. It has no bearing on the safety of the egg.
- Ginger syrupA period ginger syrup is a heavy sugar syrup infused with bruised fresh ginger root, simmered and strained; proportions varied. Modern bottled ginger syrups are broadly comparable but often much sweeter, so read the label before treating them as equivalent.
- Grape juiceIn this period this means unfermented bottled Concord juice, deep purple and sweet. Ordinary supermarket Concord juice is the closest match; white grape juice is not.
- The shakerThe recipe says only to shake well; it does not mention ice. The purpose appears to be aeration of the egg rather than chilling, consistent with hot water being added afterward.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe does not say how much hot water to add, so the finished volume is open; the whipped cream appears to be floated on top rather than stirred through.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of temperance drink books that appeared in the years before national Prohibition, when the phrase "on the water wagon" was still fresh slang for having sworn off liquor. Its purpose was to give the abstaining host something to serve that looked and behaved like a bar drink, and this one borrows its whole structure from the alcoholic flip and the hot toddy: egg shaken for body and froth, a sweet syrup for depth, hot water for comfort, grated nutmeg over the top as a barroom flourish going back centuries. Ginger syrup and bottled unfermented grape juice were the workhorses of these books, grape juice in particular having been promoted hard by pasteurizing bottlers with strong temperance sympathies, and it is generally noted that unfermented grape juice became something close to a badge of the movement. The result is a period document as much as a drink: the ritual of the saloon kept intact, with the spirit removed and the egg left exactly where it was.