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Orange and Egg
Add the beaten white of an egg to the juice of an orange. This makes a delicious drink for an invalid.
This is a two-ingredient invalid drink from the era before anyone connected shell eggs with Salmonella, and it is the one category of old recipe that cannot be salvaged by better technique.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this drink reaches a temperature that kills Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean, ungraded egg as well as on the shell. Orange juice is acidic but nowhere near acidic enough, and contact time here is seconds.
- The intended drinker is the problemIt is offered specifically for "an invalid" — the sick, the elderly, the convalescent, the very young. That is precisely the group for whom a Salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. A recipe aimed at healthy adults would be a lesser risk; this one is aimed at the worst possible audience.
- No cooking step to addBeaten white folded into cold juice is the entire dish. Heating it would scramble the white and destroy the point, so there is no adjustment that leaves the recipe recognisable. If a light, nourishing drink is wanted for someone unwell, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg product or none at all.
Egg-and-fruit-juice drinks belong to the long tradition of invalid cookery — a common chapter in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household manuals, based on the belief that a sick body needed concentrated, easily swallowed nourishment rather than solid food. Raw egg was one standard vehicle: egg nog, egg lemonade and the "egg flip" all supplied protein without chewing, and beating the white in aerated it into something a weak patient could take a little at a time. The setting here matters too. On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon collects soft drinks for the era when American temperance sentiment was hardening into national Prohibition, so the familiar egg flip and milk punch had to appear in versions with the spirits stripped out. Salmonella Enteritidis was not identified as a routine hazard of intact shell eggs until the 1980s, which is why a recipe like this one could be published for the sickroom in perfectly good faith.