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The Lenox
Add one egg to the juice of one lemon and one tablespoonful of powdered sugar. Shake with cracked ice, strain into a tall glass and fill up with ginger ale.
A temperance-era egg drink: a whole raw egg shaken with lemon, sugar and ice, lengthened with ginger ale. The construction is sound, but the central ingredient is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe egg is never heated at any point. Nothing in the method — not the acid from the lemon, not the ice, not the carbonation — brings the egg to a temperature that would address Salmonella, which can be present inside an intact, clean shell as well as on it. Shaking simply disperses any contamination through the whole glass.
- Not a shelf-life questionThis is not a matter of the recipe being old or the eggs being farm-fresh. A modern supermarket egg carries the same risk profile in an unheated drink, and the risk falls hardest on children, older drinkers, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised. If you want a frothed lemon-and-ginger-ale drink, use a current recipe written for it.
- "Powdered sugar"In drink books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar — what would now be sold as superfine or caster — not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in a modern box. It was specified because it dissolves in a cold shaker.
- The glassThe recipe does not give a size; a "tall glass" of this period would plausibly hold something in the region of 10 to 12 ounces, which would leave several ounces of ginger ale over the strained egg-and-lemon base. One serving.
- Ginger ale then and nowMuch commercial ginger ale of this period was drier and sharper than most supermarket brands today, closer to what is now sold as a spicy or Jamaica-style ginger ale, though sweeter styles were also on sale.
Books published under titles like On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belong to the years when American temperance sentiment was hardening into law, and they set out to prove that a person could stand at a bar, or a soda fountain, and be served something as elaborate as any cocktail. The egg drink section is the clearest evidence of that ambition: the whole-egg flip and the egg nog were long-standing tavern staples, and stripping out the spirit while keeping the egg, the citrus, the sugar and the shaker preserved the ritual intact. Drinks in these collections are often named for places and hotels, though the source of the Lenox's name is not established. The reliance on raw egg for body and foam was ordinary practice across the whole of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drink mixing; the understanding that eggs could carry infection internally, rather than only on the shell, came considerably later.