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The Bangor
Add the juice of one lemon to two tablespoonfuls of grape juice, break in one egg, and add two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Shake well, strain into a glass, and add carbonated water. Decorate with a slice of orange and a cherry.
This is a soda-fountain egg flip: a whole raw egg shaken with fruit juice and sugar, then lengthened with soda water and served immediately. Nothing in the process cooks or otherwise treats the egg, which is why it cannot be recommended as written.
- The raw egg is the problemThe egg is broken in whole, shaken cold, and drunk. There is no heat step, no cooked custard base, and no holding time at temperature. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella contamination, both on the shell and within the egg itself, and a drink like this is served straight to the glass.
- Acid and sugar do not make it safeThe pH and sugar levels in a shaken flip are nowhere near enough to reduce bacterial load, and the drink is consumed within a minute or two of mixing in any case.
- Who was drinking itEgg drinks of this kind were sold as a nourishing pick-me-up. Anyone who is pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised should not have an untreated raw egg in any form.
- Shell hygiene in 1913 and nowShell hygiene then and now -- Modern commercial eggs are washed, which removes the natural cuticle, and are refrigerated for that reason; neither practice makes the contents sterile. If you want a drink of this kind, use a current recipe built on a pasteurized egg product.
- What "grape juice" meant hereThe grape juice in books of this period was the unfermented bottled kind sold as a temperance drink.
- Carbonated water"Add carbonated water" means filling the glass out. The recipe yields one glass.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soft-drink and soda-fountain manuals published in the years when American temperance sentiment was hardening into national Prohibition, and its formulas are mostly bar drinks rebuilt without spirits. This one is a flip in everything but the liquor: the shaken whole egg, lemon, sugar and soda are the standard structure of a nineteenth-century egg lemonade, a drink valued as much for nourishment as for refreshment. Unfermented grape juice had a particular place in that world, having been promoted as the respectable alternative to wine, including for communion, and bottled brands were widely available. The orange slice and cherry mark it as a drink meant to be garnished and presented.