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Lemon Frost
Fill a tall glass one-fourth full of cracked ice, fiil three-fourths of lemonade full of lemonade and frost the top with a spoonful of stiffly beaten egg-white sweetened slightly and flavored with lemon-juice.
A soda-fountain style cooler from the era when raw beaten egg white was a standard garnish for cold drinks. That garnish is the problem: the egg is never heated at any point.
- Raw egg white is the hinge, and it failsThe frosting is uncooked egg white spooned onto an iced drink and consumed immediately. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the white and yolk, and nothing in this method — no heat, no acid contact of any duration, no cooking — reduces that risk. Use a current recipe for a frosted lemonade rather than this one.
- Chilling makes it worse, not betterThe drink is built on cracked ice and served cold, so the topping sits in the temperature range where bacteria are simply held rather than killed. There is also no interval in which the small amount of lemon juice could do anything meaningful.
- "Frost" is a meringue, not frozenHere "frost the top" means capping the glass with sweetened beaten white, as the recipe itself specifies. It is not a reference to freezing or to a chilled glass.
- Cracked iceCracked ice was ice chipped from a block with a pick or mallet — irregular shards larger than crushed ice and smaller than cubes. The recipe calls for enough to fill a quarter of the glass.
- YieldOne tall glass; no measure is given.
The drink belongs to the era of the American soda fountain, when the drugstore counter and the home kitchen shared a vocabulary of phosphates, frappés, egg lemonades, flips and "frosts." Egg white gave a non-alcoholic drink body and a showy head, much as it does in a gin fizz, and household books of the period printed such drinks without comment; the link between shell eggs and salmonellosis was not widely established until late in the twentieth century. The single-sentence form assumes the reader already has a plain lemonade to hand.