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Milk and Malted Milk
Substitute for Milk No. 2 Allow one new-laid egg to a breakfast cupful of tea or coffee. Beat the egg well, strain it into the cup, and add the tea or coffee very gradually, stirring briskly all the time, so that it will not curdle.
This is a raw-egg drink in all but name, and the instruction that makes it work is the same instruction that makes it unsafe.
- The hinge is also the hazard"Add the tea or coffee very gradually, stirring briskly all the time, so that it will not curdle" is an instruction for tempering: the hot liquid is diluted into the egg so that the proteins never set. Egg proteins begin to coagulate somewhere around 145-160F, and the same heat is what would reduce Salmonella (though at lower temperatures held longer). A drink built to avoid curdling is a drink built to avoid cooking the egg.
- A cup of coffee will not get there anywayCoffee comes off the boil well below boiling by the time it is poured, and here it is added gradually to a mass of cold beaten egg in a cold cup. The finished cup will be well below coagulation temperature, and briefly at that, rather than at any sustained heat that would matter.
- The eggs of 1919 are not the eggs of todayThe eggs of this period are not the eggs of today -- "New-laid" meant an egg gathered that morning from a known bird, often unwashed and with its cuticle intact. Modern shell eggs are safer on the whole, but Salmonella enteritidis can be present inside an intact, clean, uncracked egg, which is a route of contamination the original author had no reason to consider.
- Straining does nothing hereStraining out the chalazae improves the texture and removes nothing microbiological. It is worth understanding that the step is cosmetic, not protective.
- "Breakfast cupful"A breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. The ratio is one whole egg to that volume, which is a substantial amount of raw egg per serving rather than a token enrichment.
- If you want the effectEgg-enriched coffee drinks exist in current, tested forms that either cook the egg properly or specify pasteurized egg. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
It sits in a section on milk substitutes for a practical reason: the First World War years brought dairy shortages in American and British households, and household writers of the period offered stopgaps for the person who wanted something other than black coffee. Egg in hot coffee has a long and mostly separate lineage — Scandinavian and Scandinavian-American church-basement "egg coffee," in which a beaten egg and its crushed shell are stirred into the grounds and boiled, is the best-known version, and there the egg is genuinely cooked and serves to clarify the brew. The recipe here inverts that logic entirely, using the egg as a body-and-richness substitute for cream and taking pains to keep it liquid. It reflects a period in which household writers treated the raw egg as a wholesome, almost medicinal ingredient — the same era produced raw-egg tonics for invalids and the eggnogs and prairie oysters that survive as curiosities.