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Egg Lemonade
2 tbsp. lemon juice 2 tsp. sugar 1 egg 1 cup cold water Beat egg thoroughly, add sugar and lemon juice, pour in gradually the water, stirring until smooth and well mixed. Strain and serve. 1 egg 3/4 cup milk EGG NOGS
This is a raw-egg drink written specifically for invalids, and that combination is the problem: nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would make it safe.
- The egg is never cookedThe whole egg is beaten raw into cold water and lemon juice and drunk immediately. Salmonella can be present in the interior of an intact, clean shell egg, and neither the acid from two tablespoons of lemon juice nor the sugar does anything meaningful to it in the minute or two before serving.
- The intended drinker is the wrong drinkerEgg lemonade of this kind was a standard invalid drink, so the likely target is someone already ill, possibly elderly, feverish or convalescing. Those are exactly the people for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely miserable. A current recipe using pasteurised egg or a cooked custard base should be used instead.
- Straining is not a safeguardThe instruction to strain removes chalazae and unbeaten albumen for texture only. It has no bearing on bacterial load, and the drink is meant to be served cold and at once, so there is no holding step that would help either.
- The trailing lines belong to the next recipeThe trailing lines belong to a neighbouring recipe -- "1 egg 3/4 cup milk EGG NOGS" is not part of the lemonade. It appears to be a heading and ingredient line from an adjacent egg nog entry, picked up in transcription. Read the lemonade as ending at "Strain and serve."
- Quantities, for the recordAs written this makes a single glass: one cup of water plus the egg and two tablespoons of juice, sweetened with only two teaspoons of sugar.
American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly carried a Sick Room or Invalid Cookery section, and raw egg was its backbone. Before intravenous fluids and commercial nutritional supplements, an egg beaten into water, milk, wine or lemonade was a standard way to get protein and calories into someone who could not chew. Egg lemonade, egg nog, beef tea, gruel and barley water appear together in these chapters again and again, usually in single-serving quantities meant to be carried upstairs on a tray. The Philathea Cook Book, produced by a Baptist young women's Bible-class movement of that era, follows the pattern exactly. What has changed is not the nutrition but the understanding of egg-borne infection, which was not established in anything like its present form until well after these pages were set in type.