Home › Invalid Cookery › Albumen Beverages
Albumen Beverages
cup orange or lemon juice Syrup to taste Beat egg white to a froth, add fruit juice, strain, sweeten. Serve cold.
White 1 egg Syrup for fruit beverages can be made by cooking 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water twelve minutes.
Albumen water is made by adding cup water to the egg white, omitting the fruit juice and syrup. the fruit juice and syrup.
Albumenized milk is made by using cup milk with the egg white. Fruit drinks are made by combining sugar syrup, plain or carbonated water, and fruit juice. 1 tube Peptonizing Powder
This is a set of variations on one idea: raw egg white loosened with liquid and served to a sick person. The central problem is that nothing here is ever heated, and the drink was intended for exactly the people least able to withstand a foodborne infection.
- Raw egg white, uncooked, for invalidsThe egg white is beaten and served cold with no heat step at any point. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the egg itself, and the drink was prescribed for the convalescent, the elderly and children — the groups in whom salmonellosis is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. A current recipe using pasteurised egg product should be consulted instead.
- Albumenized milk compounds the problemThat variant adds untreated raw egg to milk and serves it cold with no cooking. Milk of the period may well have been unpasteurised too, and invalid-cookery writing of the era often stressed the need for clean milk. Two uncooked animal proteins held at room temperature is not a combination to reproduce.
- The missing fractionsThe transcription has lost the fractions before every "cup" — the original almost certainly read a quarter or a half cup of juice, water or milk to one egg white. The quantities as printed cannot be taken at face value.
- Peptonizing powderThe stray line at the end belongs to a neighbouring recipe. Peptonizing powders were pancreatic-enzyme preparations, generally pancreatic extract with sodium bicarbonate, sold to pre-digest milk for weak stomachs. They are not sold for domestic use now and have no place in this drink.
- The sugar syrup is the one sound partx_typo_guard
- StrainingThe straining after the juice goes in most likely catches stringy or set portions of the white, acid having tightened the albumen. Read that way it is a texture step, not a hygiene one, and it does nothing about the underlying risk.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, back when most nursing happened at home and a long convalescence from typhoid, influenza or surgery was ordinary. Egg white — albumen — was regarded as the purest and most easily assimilated form of protein available in a domestic kitchen, and "albumen water" is often said to have been prescribed for patients who could keep nothing else down. The logic was of its time: albumen was thought to pass through the stomach with almost no digestive work, and the fruit juice was added chiefly to make an otherwise slippery, tasteless drink palatable. The same reasoning produced beef tea, barley water and peptonized milk, all of which appear in books like this one alongside these beverages. Hospital dietetics moved away from raw-egg preparations over the twentieth century, and the whole genre of home invalid cookery faded as care shifted to hospitals.