The egg in the syrup was because they used to have to 'clarify' sugar prior to use to remove impurities. You do not have to do that these days.
When they peeled lemons they would use a knife and only pull off the yellow peel and not the white pith. No wonder your lemonade was disgusting!
Eggs whites whipt is NOT stuff peaks. It is egg broken up well until you have broken the membranes. You then stir this into your syrup GENTLY and then stop stirring.
'Boiling' is not a rolling boil. Bubbles should JUST break the surface
You also need to strain through a jelly bag, or flannel, to remove the egg. (But these days you don't even need the egg, as explained above.)
Old cooking recipes were written on the assumption of a certain level of knowledge and accepted practice and often involved procedures designed to make up for deficiencies we don't deal with in modern times!
So many things are like this, written with an expectation of “common” (shared) knowledge. But remove from the original source a few times (in this case by time), and those implicit instructions are lost.
The poor Tik Tokker did everything the instructions said with the “common” knowledge of the modern day. What whipped egg whites mean. What boiling means. If you were to take those instructions amd follow them yourself, you’d have done just about exactly what she’s have done.
“Peel lemon” is now “Zest lemon peel” to specify the yellow flavored part. As said, you don’t have to clarify sugar anymore, so that process has been lost. How you “strain” things even is different.
Wow. So much has changed from when that book was published.
How much else has changed when you look at something with implied “common” knowledge?
One of my favourite cocktail recipes is over 200 years old, and relies on deliberately curdling milk and spending two days on it in order to get a good result. And if you tell a modern person “hey, I made a delicious cocktail out of shitty brandy, lemon juice with bits and peel in it, and curdled milk”, they will be horrified and disgusted. Until they try it, and discover it’s great. It relies on a technique called milk clarification, not dissimilar to egg white clarification - the gross curdling process results in the nastier tannins and phenols binding to the curd, while the whey is left with all the sweet, pleasant flavours and the alcohol, and incidentally forms a product that is stable for storage in cold temperatures for MONTHS while the flavour only improves. You need a good cheese cloth or coffee filters to strain it, rather than just putting it in a wire mesh strainer or colander. You throw away the gross curds because they do not make for good yoghurt or cheese.
A lot of these old recipes prized a stablised end product, because there was no refrigeration other than a root cellar unless you were rich enough to buy ice and keep an ice-house for your chilled goods. And it’s nice to have pre-made fancy drinks sitting ready when you want them instead of having to make from scratch every time.
2020 cake recipe: 2 eggs, beaten
3020 cook: seems like a bit much but ok *chisels open neo-tyrannoraptor egg*
