Hot Whiskey Flip – Jerry Thomas ‘The Bon Vivants Companion’
Use large bar glass, heated
One teaspoonful of sugar.
Yolk of one egg.
One wineglass of whiskey.
DISSOLVE the sugar in a little hot water, add the brandy and egg, shake up thoroughly, pour into a medium bar glass, and fill it one-half full of boiling water. Grate a little nutmeg on top, and serve.
Somewhere in this ‘how to’ description it’s missing an important step, or people had a strange idea of what made a desirable drink. I made the recipe to the exact method above, I shook the drink without ice as there’s no mention of it, and it didn’t make sense to shake something with ice and then add boiling water? When you make it this way it starts out looking good, then fairly swiftly the egg starts to cook and it has all the charm of whisky flavoured scrambled eggs, you can see in the image it separating out. I’m not sure on the way around this, I suspect that if you make it like the Hot English Rum Flip (March 4th) it may solve this problem, but the book is pretty specific on methodology for some drinks so I suspect that this may have been how it was made? I’m not sure if shaking this with ice first would solve this problem, it might make it take longer for the egg to cook, but then the finished drink wouldn’t be a ‘hot’ flip, more of a luke-warm room temperature flip, which doesn’t have quite the same appeal on a chilly day. This puzzle needs a little science to solve.
