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Hot Egg Shake
Add the juice of one half lemon and two teaspoonfuls of sugar to one egg. Shake well and fill up glass with hot water.
Bouillon and Egg No. I Beat up one fresh egg with two tablespoonfuls of cream. Add two tablespoonfuls of liquid beef extract and fill up the cup with hot water. Season with celery salt and salt.
Bouillon and Egg No. 2 Beat one egg until light, add two tablespoonfuls of beef extract and a small piece of butter. Fill up with hot water and stir until butter is melted. Season with salt.
All three drinks here are built on a whole raw egg that is warmed by hot liquid and then swallowed. That is the one step that cannot be brought forward into a modern kitchen, and it is worth being clear about why.
- The egg is never cookedFilling a glass or cup with hot water does not pasteurize an egg. The water drops well below any lethal temperature the moment it meets the cold egg, cream and lemon juice, and there is no measured temperature or holding time anywhere in the instructions. Water hot enough to hold a lethal temperature would visibly curdle the egg.
- The specific pathogenShell eggs are the classic vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean, fresh egg. Drinks of this kind — raw egg suspended in warm liquid and consumed immediately — are a recognised route of infection, and the risk is highest for exactly the people invalid drinks were served to: the very young, the elderly, the pregnant and the already ill. If you want a warm egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Liquid beef extractThis means the thick, salty, near-black meat concentrate sold as Liebig's Extract of Meat or Bovril, not canned broth or today's stock concentrates. Two tablespoonfuls of it is an enormous amount by modern palates; a comparable cup of bouillon would use roughly a teaspoon.
- "Fill up the glass" and "fill up the cup"The period assumption is a tumbler or teacup of about 6 to 8 ounces, so each of these makes a single serving. The recipes give no proportion of water because the vessel is the measurement.
- Celery saltThen as now, a blend of ground celery seed and salt. It was a common seasoning for savoury invalid drinks; note that the recipe salts twice, with celery salt and again with plain salt.
- Why the lemon does not helpThe acid in half a lemon lightly denatures the surface of the egg and thins the texture, but it does not reliably kill bacteria at these concentrations or in this timeframe.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the small burst of publishing that accompanied national Prohibition in the United States, when hotels, clubs and household cooks needed a repertoire of drinks that could be served in place of the bar list. The egg drinks section may well echo that bar list, and the two bouillon-and-egg cups descend from the beef tea and "invalid drinks" chapters of nineteenth-century domestic manuals, where a raw egg beaten into something warm was standard nourishment for the sick and the convalescent. The reliance on liquid beef extract dates the book neatly ’ Liebig's concentrate and its commercial descendants were mass-market pantry staples from the late nineteenth century onward, and a spoonful stirred into hot water was widely regarded as a restorative in its own right.