The Jewish Echinacea?

[elleng]

When she was growing up in Brooklyn, Barbra Streisand’s mother fed her a mixture of sweet egg yolk and milk to soothe and strengthen her voice. In an interview published last week, Streisand giggled when recalling the drink’s goofy name: “guggle-muggle.”

As it turns out, this “guggle-muggle” is a gently Americanized version of an Old Country cure named gogol mogol. If chicken soup is the Jewish penicillin, gogol mogol is more like the Jewish echinacea: no one really knows if it works, but that doesn’t stop people from taking it.

Rooted in the shtetl era, gogol mogol has endured long enough to nurse generations of American Jews — including Streisand and the former New York City mayor Ed Koch — from their sickbeds. Now, between the High Holy Days and flu season, is as good a time as any to reboot the recipe.

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/now-drinking-the-jewish-echinacea/?hpw