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Egg Lemonade
Place in a large glass a fresh egg, tablespoon sugar, juice of a sound lemon, fill up balance with water, shake in a shaker with a little ice until ingredients are well mixed, then strain and serve. This is a delicious summer drink.
This is a raw-egg beverage of a kind common in soda fountains and sickroom cookery a century ago. The egg is never heated at any point, which is why it cannot be recommended today.
- Raw egg, no kill stepThe whole egg goes into the glass uncooked and is only shaken with ice. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would destroy Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean-shelled egg.
- Acid and cold do not sanitiseThe lemon juice and the ice are sometimes assumed to make the drink safe. They do not: chilling only slows bacterial growth, and the pH of a single lemon diluted into a tall glass of water is nowhere near low enough, or held long enough, to be lethal to pathogens.
- Who was drinking itDrinks like this were pressed on invalids, children and convalescents — precisely the groups for whom raw egg carries the highest risk of severe illness. The same applies to pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- The period assumptionThe recipe's only safeguard is the phrase "a fresh egg." That reflects a time before refrigerated distribution and before egg-borne transmission of the organism was understood; freshness affects spoilage, not this contamination.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg product or pasteurised in-shell eggs, and follow its quantities and handling.
Egg lemonade belongs to the family of "egg drinks" that filled American soda-fountain manuals and household books from the 1870s through the 1920s — egg phosphates, egg creams, egg nogs, egg malteds — all of them ways of turning a cheap, universally available protein into something that looked like refreshment and could be sold or served in minutes. The genre sat on the border between soda counter and sickroom: an egg beaten into lemonade or milk was standard nourishment for the feverish and the convalescent, recommended by nurses' manuals as well as by drink books, on the reasoning that a patient who could not face solid food could still swallow an egg. Its appearance in a general international collection is typical of the period, when cookbooks doubled as domestic medical advice. The whole category faded in the twentieth century, well before public-health guidance turned firmly against raw egg.