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Orange Egg Flip
1 Egg 1 Orange 2 Tablespoons Corn Syrup Lemon 8 Teaspoon Salt Combine the ingredients according to the directions for egg flip, or heat the yolk and the white separately, folding the white into the other ingredients after they have been mixed thoroughly. Serve the flip very cold.
A raw-egg beverage of the sort once kept in every household manual, printed here with the compressed typography that plagues this book. The problems are partly transcription and partly the egg itself.
- Why this one is off the tableThe egg is never heated at all — it is beaten, mixed with orange juice and syrup, and served very cold. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and acidity from citrus does not kill it. A modern recipe using pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg should be used instead.
- "Heat the yolk and the white separately"Almost certainly a misprint for beat. Nothing else in the method warms anything, the white is to be folded in, and the finished drink is served very cold.
- 8 Teaspoon SaltRead this as one-eighth teaspoon; the fraction bar appears to have dropped out in setting. Eight teaspoons of salt in a single glass would be something like 45 to 50 grams.
- "Lemon"The quantity is genuinely missing. Comparable flips of the period call for a teaspoon or two of lemon juice to sharpen the orange; the book gives no figure and none should be assumed.
- Corn syrupKaro-style light corn syrup, sold as a household sweetener in this period. Being already a syrup, it does the dissolving work granulated sugar would not do in an unheated drink.
- "Directions for egg flip"This entry is a variation and depends on a base egg flip recipe printed elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here; the orange juice appears to stand in for part of the liquid called for there.
- YieldOne egg and one orange; a single serving.
The egg flip belongs to the long tradition of the nourishing drink — egg beaten into milk, wine, ale or fruit juice and given to invalids, children and convalescents when solid food was thought too taxing. By the period of books like this one, the alcoholic versions were increasingly associated with the bar, while the domestic kitchen kept a temperance descendant sweetened with sugar or with commercial corn syrup. Orange juice as a flavouring fits a time when citrus was becoming a more reliably available grocery item as California and Florida shipping expanded, and when household writers were promoting it as a source of what was then newly being called vitamine. The advice to serve it very cold is a reminder that the icebox rather than the mechanical refrigerator was still usual in many of the homes these books addressed, so a chilled drink was worth specifying.