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Hot Lime Egg Ade
One egg, 1 ounce lime juice, 1 spoonful powdered sugar. Mix the egg thoroughly, strain if necessary. Add hot soda, stirring while filling. Serve nutmeg and cinnamon.
This is a raw-egg drink in everything but name, and that is the whole problem with it. The notes below explain what the original assumed and why the method does not hold up.
- The egg is never cookedA whole raw egg is beaten in the glass and hot water is poured over it while stirring. Nothing here holds the egg at a temperature that would destroy Salmonella; the water cools instantly on contact with the cold egg and juice, and the mixture is drunk immediately. Any current recipe for a hot egg drink relies on pasteurized shell eggs or on cooking the mixture to a measured temperature.
- "Hot soda" was not carbonatedAt a turn-of-the-century fountain the hot tap drew plain hot water, not charged water, since carbonation will not survive heat. So the drink is egg, lime and sugar in hot water, with no acid or heat step strong enough to make the egg safe.
- The acid does not sterilizeOne ounce of lime juice — two tablespoons — is enough to curdle and cloud the egg slightly. Curdling is a protein change, not a kill step, and the small amount of acid in a full glass does not render a raw egg safe.
- Straining makes it worse, not better"Strain if necessary" suggests the beaten egg could go into the glass lumpy. Straining removes the visible evidence of an underbeaten raw egg while leaving the raw egg itself in the glass.
- Why it was served at allEgg drinks were sold across the fountain counter as nourishment for invalids and for people who would not sit down to a meal.
- If you want the flavorHot lime, sugar and grated nutmeg with cinnamon is a pleasant combination on its own. For the egg version, use a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs rather than this one.
Soda fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s give substantial space to hot dispensing, because the fountain was a year-round business and iced drinks did not sell in January. Hot water, hot beef tea, hot clam bouillon, hot chocolate and hot lemonade shared the counter with the syrups, and "egg ades" and egg phosphates sat at the intersection of refreshment and medicine — an egg beaten into a glass was common convalescent fare, and the fountain clerk was in some measure a dispensing pharmacist, since many American fountains of the period stood inside drugstores. Lime juice, sold in bottles, was the tart alternative to lemon; the finishing dust of nutmeg and cinnamon echoes the older tavern tradition of egg nog, flip and possets, where beaten egg in a hot drink had long been ordinary.