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Albumen Water
Stir the white of an egg with a silver fork, and add one glass of water which has been sweetened and flavored. Mix well.
This is raw egg white, thinned and sweetened, served to the sick. The whole point of the preparation is that nothing is cooked, which is exactly why it should not be made now.
- Raw egg, uncooked, undiluted by heatNothing in the method brings the egg white above room temperature. Salmonella can be present on the shell and, less often, within the egg itself, and cracking an egg into a glass carries any surface contamination straight into the drink.
- The intended drinker is the worst possible oneAlbumen water belongs to the invalid-cookery tradition, and preparations of this kind were made for the feverish, the convalescent, the very young and the very old. Those are precisely the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant.
- No acid, no alcohol, no saltSome raw-egg preparations lean on lemon juice, spirits or brine as a partial hurdle. Here there is only sugar and flavouring in water, which does nothing to the bacterial load and gives it a mild medium to sit in if the glass is left standing.
- Pasteurised whites are not the same recipeCartoned pasteurised egg white exists and is safe to drink, but it behaves and tastes differently, and substituting it turns this into a different preparation rather than a revival of this one. If a clear protein drink is wanted for someone unwell, use a current recipe or a commercial product.
- "One glass"Unfixed in the original. The book gives no measure, drinking-glass sizes were not standardised, and no volume should be inferred.
Albumen water belongs to a whole nineteenth-century genre of invalid cookery — beef tea, barley water, wine whey, arrowroot gruel — built on the belief that a sick body needed nourishment in the most easily absorbed form possible, with as little work asked of the stomach as could be managed. Egg white was prized because it was understood to be nearly pure protein, cheap, universally available, and bland enough to be flavoured for a patient with no appetite. Books like Butterick's, aimed at the general household rather than the professional kitchen, commonly carried a section of these preparations, since nursing the sick at home was ordinary domestic work rather than something delegated to a hospital. What the recipe reveals is how little was then understood about foodborne infection: the safety of the raw egg was simply not a question anyone in the household was expected to ask, and the connection between eggs and salmonella would not be widely acted upon in domestic advice for decades yet.