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Orange Egg Nog
1/2 tsp. lemon juice 1 tbsp. cream 1 egg 2 tsp. sugar juice of 1 orange Beat egg yolk until light, add 1/2 of sugar, then gradually the orange and lemon juice. Then add cream and fold in the stiffly beaten white to which has been added the remainder of the sugar. Other fruit juice may be used instead of orange.
This is a raw-egg drink intended for someone already ill, and that combination is the problem. The notes below explain the hazard and the period context rather than offering a way around it.
- Raw egg, never heatedBoth yolk and white go into the glass uncooked, and nothing in the method brings them anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed. Shell eggs can carry the organism inside an intact, clean shell, so washing or picking a fresh egg does not address it.
- Who it was made forThis kind of beaten-egg drink was typically given to invalids and convalescents, the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become severe, though nothing on the page itself confirms where it sat in the book.
- Raw cream as wellThe tablespoon of cream may well have been unpasteurised in a household of this period, which would add Listeria and Campylobacter to the ledger. Pasteurised cream removes that particular risk but does nothing about the egg.
- Acid is not a treatmentThe orange and lemon juice may look like they might do some work, but the quantity and contact time here are nowhere near enough to make raw egg safe. Citrus in an egg nog is for flavour and body, not preservation.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised shell eggs or pasteurised liquid egg, or a cooked-custard base. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Egg nog in cookbooks of this vintage can mean two quite different things wearing one name: the spirituous Christmas punch, and the plain beaten egg in milk or juice handed to the sick. This looks like the second. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century invalid cookery held that a patient who could not manage solid food should still be given something concentrated and easily swallowed, and the raw egg — cheap, soft, and thought of as almost pure nourishment — was a standard vehicle, whipped into milk, broth, wine, or as here, fruit juice. Chapters of "sick room" or "invalid" recipes appear in cookbooks of the era. The addition of orange juice reflects a period enthusiasm for citrus as a restorative, well established in practice before vitamin C was isolated in 1928 and named in the early 1930s. What the recipe does not reflect is any understanding of egg-borne infection, which is why it reads today as a period document rather than a set of instructions.