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Egg Lemonade for Fifty
8 quarts of water--a tin milk pail full. 3 pounds of sugar--6 or 7 cupfuls. 2 dozen lemons. 2 oranges. 8 or 10 whites of eggs. Shaved or broken ice. Grate the rinds of 8 or 10 of the lemons and the oranges into a large bowl, using a tin grater, and take less or more, according to the size and degree of ripeness or greenness of the fruit. Scrape off the grated rind that adheres. Put a little sugar in the bowl, and rub the zest and sugar together with the back of a spoon. Squeeze in the juice of all, add the sugar and some water and then the whites of eggs, and beat the mixture till the sugar is dissolved; put in water to make the specified amount and strain the lemonade into another vessel containing ice.
When to be served fill a glass three parts full, invert another on top, the rims close together, and shake up to make the foam.
This is a raw-egg drink built in bulk and held over ice, which puts it outside what a modern kitchen can safely serve. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a revised method.
- The egg whites are never cookedEight to ten raw shell-egg whites go into eight quarts of cold liquid and are never heated at any stage. Raw egg white can carry Salmonella, and nothing in the process — not the lemon juice, not the sugar, not the ice — reliably kills it.
- Acid does not pasteuriseThe juice of two dozen lemons sounds aggressive, but diluted into eight quarts of cold liquid it cannot be treated as a kill step: cold acid on its own is not a validated method for destroying Salmonella, whatever the pH. Citrus in a cold drink is a flavouring, not a control measure.
- Scale multiplies the riskOne contaminated egg is diluted through fifty servings, so a single bad white contaminates the whole pail. Batch beverages of this kind are a classic vector precisely because one ingredient touches every glass.
- Held at the wrong temperatureThe recipe strains the batch into a vessel of ice and serves from it. A pail of egg-containing liquid served out over the course of an event can easily spend long enough in the bacterial growth range to matter, and ice chills the surface and top of a large batch far more effectively than the middle.
- Who it was served toA batch for fifty means a mixed crowd: children, elderly guests and pregnant women drinking from the same pail. These are exactly the groups for whom a raw-egg drink carries the most serious consequences.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe for a frothed lemonade or egg-white sour written around pasteurised egg product, and follow its holding instructions.
- Reading the originalThe recipe itself glosses eight quarts as 'a tin milk pail full', which is why the pail stands in for a measure here. Three pounds of granulated sugar is roughly six and three-quarter cups, so the recipe's own '6 or 7 cupfuls' is a fair check on the weight.
Frothed egg lemonade belonged to the soda-fountain and church-social end of American drinking, a respectable alternative to punch in the temperance decades either side of 1900. The trick of shaking a drink between two glasses, rims pressed together, is often associated with the fountain trade, though shaking between two vessels is an old and widespread practice in both bar and household use. The instruction to rub grated zest into sugar with the back of a spoon is the older method behind what bartenders now call oleo-saccharum: the sugar draws the aromatic oil out of the peel, giving a depth of citrus that juice alone cannot. Recipes scaled "for fifty" are a signature of the period's institutional cooking, when a single cook might be responsible for a Sunday-school picnic or a boarding-house supper with no refrigeration beyond a block of ice.