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Moxie Eggnogg
Beat one egg until very light, and add one half cup of ice cold moxie gradually, while beating constantly.
A two-line soda-fountain drink from a temperance-era collection, and a straightforward example of the raw-egg beverage that was once standard fountain practice. The reason it cannot be served today has nothing to do with the Moxie.
- Raw shell egg, never heatedThe whole egg goes in uncooked and the drink is served immediately, ice cold. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean, un-cracked shell egg.
- No alcohol and no acid doing any workTraditional eggnogs and flips carried enough spirit to give some bacterial reduction over days of aging. This has none, and the mild acidity of a carbonated soft drink over a minute of beating does nothing comparable. If you want an egg drink, use a current recipe built for it.
- Moxie itselfStill made, though the formula has shifted over a century. The modern bottling is a bitter, gentian-flavored soda; Moxie was sold first as a nerve tonic. Half a cup is four fluid ounces.
- "Ice cold" meant the fountain"Ice cold" -- A serving instruction about the temperature a cold drink was expected to have, not a food-safety step.
- YieldOne glass. The recipe gives no yield; it is one beaten egg with four fluid ounces of Moxie.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance drink books that appeared around the arrival of Prohibition, and its purpose is visible in the structure: a section of egg drinks that stands in for the flips, nogs and milk punches of the saloon, with soda water or a proprietary tonic where the spirit used to be. Moxie was one of the great American branded beverages of the period, originating in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1870s and marketed first as a nerve food before it became a bottled soft drink; its name entered general English as a word for nerve or pluck. Egg in a drink was not an oddity then but ordinary fountain work, the egg beaten to a foam to give body and richness that a plain soda lacked, and recipes of this shape appear in soda-fountain manuals on either side of 1900.