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Hot Lime Cream
To the beaten white of one egg add two tablespoonfuls of lime juice, and two teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar. Stir well and add hot water and a spoonful of whipped cream. "Drink of this cup--you'll find there's a spell in Its every drop 'gainst the ills of Mortality."
This is a temperance imitation of a hot egg flip, and the egg is the problem: it is beaten raw, dosed with hot water from the kettle, and drunk. Nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would make raw egg white safe.
- The raw white never cooksThe raw white never reliably cooks -- Hot water poured into a glass of beaten egg white and juice may not reach the 160F/71C recommended to kill Salmonella, and it cools further on contact with the cold ingredients and the glass. The white may cloud or thread slightly, which looks like cooking but need not mean the drink has been heated through.
- Why 1913 was less worriedWhy the period was less worried -- Raw egg drinks were routine in the era of the soda fountain and the sickroom, before shell-egg salmonellosis was understood as a systemic problem. Modern egg supply is cleaner in most respects but the risk to the very young, the elderly, the pregnant and the immunocompromised is real and documented.
- The cream compounds itA spoonful of whipped cream on top adds a second uncooked dairy element, and whether that cream was pasteurized would have depended on where and when it was bought. Unheated egg together with unheated dairy in a warm drink is an unfavourable combination.
- Two tablespoonfuls of lime juice will not fix itAcid is sometimes assumed to sterilise a drink. It does not. Citrus juice at this dilution slows bacterial growth but does not eliminate pathogens in the time it takes to stir and serve.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe from a reputable source that specifies pasteurized egg product or a heated custard base, rather than adapting this one.
- On the measurements, for the recordThe quantities themselves are unremarkable: two tablespoons juice and two teaspoons powdered sugar, with the amount of hot water left to the cook. "Powdered sugar" in a book of this date means finely milled sugar; the cornstarch found in modern American confectioners' sugar is a later convention.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of American temperance drink books that flourished in the years before national Prohibition, when writers set out to prove that a household could entertain, and a sickroom could be comforted, without spirits. Hot Lime Cream is a direct substitution exercise: the hot egg flip relied on a beaten egg, sugar, and boiling water for its body and warmth, and here the liquor is simply removed and lime juice put in its place. The closing quotation is generally traced to Thomas Moore, whose lyrics were quoted freely and often loosely in nineteenth-century American compilations; temperance authors were fond of borrowing the language of the drinking song for the cause of abstinence.