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Eggnog
1 to 2 tablespoons sugar Speck nutmeg and salt cup milk Beat yolk, add sugar, salt and milk, strain, add stiffly beaten white and nutmeg.
This is a raw-egg drink written for the sickroom, and that is precisely the combination that makes it unmakeable today. The notes below explain the problems in the text rather than offering a way around them.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe yolk and white are beaten into cold milk and served as-is; nothing in the method takes the mixture above room temperature. Salmonella in a shell egg is not killed by beating, sugar, or nutmeg, and a custard-style eggnog must be held near 160F to be safe.
- Who this was written forEggnog of this kind was a fixture of period invalid cookery, aimed at the sick, elderly, convalescent and children — exactly the groups for whom an egg-borne infection is most likely to become serious. If that is the context here, the intended audience makes the risk worse, not lighter.
- Milk of unknown statusThe recipe simply says "milk" and gives no indication of its source or treatment. Depending on the period, the milk may not have been pasteurised, which would add a second uncooked animal product to the glass.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe egg itself is never listed, only implied by "Beat yolk" and "stiffly beaten white," and the milk is given as a bare "cup" with any fraction apparently lost in printing. There is no reliable way to reconstruct the intended proportions from this text.
- "Speck"A period term for a trace amount, less than a pinch. It turns up in other cookbooks of the era for nutmeg, salt and cayenne.
- If you want eggnogUse a current recipe built on a cooked custard base, or pasteurised eggs. Do not adapt this one.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in American household books through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and eggnog was one of its fixtures: raw egg beaten into milk was regarded as concentrated, easily swallowed nourishment for someone who could not manage solid food, in an era before intravenous fluids or commercial nutritional supplements were available in the home. The same page in such books often sat alongside beef tea, barley water, gruel and milk toast, all of them chosen for blandness and for the belief that strength could be fed back into a patient a spoonful at a time. The alcoholic eggnog of Christmas punch bowls and the sickroom eggnog here are recognizably versions of the same drink; the origin of the name is disputed, with nog, an East Anglian word for a strong ale, and noggin, a small drinking vessel, both commonly suggested. Written for a period that had no notion of egg-borne Salmonella as a systematic risk, it is worth reading as a document of how households nursed their own, and not as instructions.