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Hot Lime Shake
Beat one egg until light and add two tablespoonfuls of lime juice, and a teaspoonful of powdered sugar. Shake well, and strain into a glass, adding hot water. A little nutmeg or cinnamon may be sprinkled on the top.
This is a temperance version of a bar egg flip: a whole raw egg, acid, sugar and hot water from the tap or kettle. The problem is the egg, which never reaches a temperature that would make it safe.
- The egg is never cookedHot water poured into a strained, beaten egg does not hold anywhere near the temperature needed to pasteurise it, and the drink is meant to be swallowed at once. Salmonella in a shell egg is a real risk in a preparation like this, and the two tablespoonfuls of lime juice do nothing to control it.
- Worse, not better, if the water is boilingWater hot enough to matter will curdle the egg into strings the moment it hits the glass. The original calls for the egg to be strained and for the water only to be "hot," and nothing in the recipe amounts to a cooking step.
- No safe rewrite hereIf you want a hot lime drink of this kind, use a current recipe built around pasteurised egg or a cooked custard base rather than adjusting the timings above.
- On the units, for reading"Powdered sugar" in this period means finely ground sugar rather than coarse granulated; it is not necessarily the modern confectioners' sugar. "Shake well" implies a shaker, though the recipe specifies neither ice nor a particular vessel.
- YieldOne glass; the amount of hot water is not specified.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the run of temperance drink books published in the years around national Prohibition, when bartenders and hostesses alike needed a repertoire that looked and behaved like a bar list without the spirits. The egg flip was one of the easiest conversions: the classic flip is egg, sugar and spirit shaken to a froth and dusted with nutmeg, so removing the brandy or rum arguably left much of the drink's character — the body, the foam, the grated spice on top — in place. Hot egg drinks of this family are much older than Prohibition and were long treated as restorative, served to invalids and to people coming in from the cold. The nutmeg or cinnamon on top is the customary garnish of the flip, as in the alcoholic original.