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Hot Lemon Whip
Add the juice of one lemon to the well-beaten white of one egg and three teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar. Stir well and add hot water. Sprinkle nutmeg and cinnamon on top.
This is a temperance version of a hot egg flip, and the problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: the egg white is never cooked.
- The egg is the issueRaw egg white beaten into a glass and topped with hot tap-kettle water does not reach a temperature that eliminates Salmonella. Water hot enough to pasteurize the white would also cook it into shreds, which is precisely the texture the recipe is trying to avoid.
- Lemon juice is not a safeguardThe acidity of one lemon dispersed through a tumbler of hot water is nowhere near sufficient to make raw egg safe. Acid-marinated preparations are not a substitute for heat, and the whip is diluted besides.
- Why it was drunk anywayHot egg drinks were commonly given to invalids and for sore throats well into the twentieth century, at a time when the specific risk from raw shell eggs was not understood or measured as it is now. Modern shell eggs move through a longer supply chain.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or carton egg white, and follow its handling instructions. We are not going to supply revised temperatures for this one.
- Reading the original"Powdered sugar" in books of this period can mean finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today, though by the date of this book either is possible. The quantity of hot water is unstated; the recipe gives no guide beyond a single serving.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of temperance drink books published in the years around national Prohibition, when American households needed a repertoire of things to serve that were emphatically not punch. The hot egg flip was an obvious candidate for conversion: the traditional version leaned on brandy, rum or ale, and stripping the spirit out left lemon, sugar, egg and hot water, with the grated nutmeg and cinnamon kept on top because that dusting was the visual signature of the drink. Hot lemon-and-egg preparations also carried a long association with nursing and the sickroom, which gave the teetotal version a second respectable footing; the same combination turns up in nineteenth-century invalid cookery under names like egg lemonade. The whipped white is doing the work the alcohol used to do in a sense, giving body and a foam that holds the spice.