Home › Sandwiches › Egg Lemonade
Egg Lemonade
1 egg. INGREDIENTS. 4 tablespoonfuls of sugar.
Juice of 2 lemons. 2 cups of water.
Method.- Beat the egg until white and yolk are well mixed; then beat in the sugar, the lemon juice and the water.
I pineapple.
A raw-egg drink of the kind sold at soda fountains and given to invalids around 1900. The core problem is that the egg is never heated at any point.
- Raw egg, never cookedThe whole egg is beaten into cold sweetened lemon juice and water and drunk immediately. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, so Salmonella present in or on the shell egg is neither killed nor inhibited. Lemon juice is acidic but does not reliably pasteurise egg in the minutes this drink stands. If you want an egg-based cold drink, follow a current recipe written for the purpose.
- Who this was made forEgg drinks of this kind turn up in invalid-cookery and sickroom chapters of the period, though this recipe itself says nothing about its intended drinker. If it was given to the sick, the elderly or the young, those are precisely the groups for whom raw egg carries the greatest risk today.
- The ingredient list is brokenThe egg that the method calls for never appears in the ingredients, and the closing "1 pineapple. 4 cups of sugar." does not belong to this drink at all; it most likely strayed in from an adjacent recipe.
- Proportions, for readingFour tablespoons of sugar to the juice of two lemons and two cups of water is roughly a standard fountain lemonade — about 50 g sugar, 80–100 ml juice — sweetened a little harder than modern taste, with the egg contributing body and froth rather than flavour.
Egg lemonade belongs to the family of "egg drinks" — egg nog, egg phosphate, egg cream in its original form — that filled American soda fountain menus and invalid-cookery chapters from the 1870s through the 1920s. A whole raw egg beaten into an acidic sweet drink was valued for two things: the froth it gave when shaken, and the belief that egg was concentrated, easily taken nourishment for someone who could not manage solid food. Household manuals of the period regularly prescribed beaten egg in wine, milk or lemonade for fevers and convalescence, and the practice long outlived the medical reasoning behind it. The fountain versions eventually disappeared, and raw egg left the counter, for reasons that are not easy to pin down.