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Milk Egg Nog
2 tsp. sugar 4 drops vanilla Beat eggs thoroughly. Add sugar and milk. Add flavoring and serve in tumbler.
This is a raw-egg drink written for an invalid, and that combination is the problem. The notes below explain the hazard and the gaps in the text rather than offering a way around them.
- Raw egg, never heatedNothing in this recipe brings the egg above room temperature. Salmonella Enteritidis can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell egg, and beating it into cold milk neither kills it nor slows it down.
- Written for the worst possible drinkerA beaten-egg-and-milk drink of this kind was invalid food, made for the feverish, the convalescent, the very old and the very young: precisely the group for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely miserable. If an eggnog is wanted, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Milk assumed raw or newly boiledMilk may not have been pasteurized -- in a household cookbook of this vintage the milk called for was not necessarily pasteurized, and raw milk carried its own load of pathogens. The recipe gives no instruction to scald it.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOnly the sugar and vanilla are quantified. "Beat eggs" gives no number, and the milk has no measure at all — the printed line for them has evidently dropped out. Comparable sick-room versions of the period use one egg to roughly a cup of milk, but that is inference, not what this page says.
- "Tumbler"A straight-sided drinking glass, perhaps eight ounces or so, which is the only real clue to the intended yield: one serving.
- No spirits hereThis version calls for none, though plenty of invalid recipes of the era add a spoonful of brandy or sherry. Nothing about the alcohol would make the raw egg safe in any case.
Egg beaten into milk was one of the standard invalid foods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sitting in the same chapter as beef tea, gruel, barley water and wine whey: things a patient who could not chew might still swallow, chosen because eggs and milk were understood as concentrated nourishment. The word nog is generally traced to an old English term for a strong ale, with the sweetened egg-and-milk drink taking the name by the eighteenth century; the alcoholic Christmas version and this austere bedside one are the same idea at different strengths. Church and society cookbooks like the Philathea — said to have come out of a women's Bible class movement of the early 1900s and to have been sold to raise funds — often carried a short sick-room section, because home nursing was still the household's job and the recipes in it were nursing instructions as much as cooking. That the eggs are served raw reflects a period confidence in the fresh egg that later bacteriology did not support.