It is sometimes the case that on the morning of Jan. 1, I arise bleary-eyed from a brief sleep with those famous final words of Beckett’s “Unnamable” on my mind: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Fortunately, I’m not reflecting on the whole messy enterprise of life itself. I’m concerned with drinking. Can I, should I, really keep going after a season of festive drinking that ended a little too festively?

Before I go on, a disclaimer: You should not have cause to make a habit of the hair of the dog. And if you’re under the impression it will truly help KO your hangover, you’re standing on shaky scientific ground. Moving on, then: When it comes to picking a next-day drink, I enjoy making bloody marys a good deal more than I like drinking them. A pint of Guinness frequently feels like just the thing, but it’s not as nourishing as it looks. What I really want is protein and a bit of effervescence.

Josey Packard, a bartender at Boston’s Drink (it took the prize for Best American Cocktail Bar at the 2011 Tales of the Cocktail festival), suggested just the thing. “The very best experience I have ever had with a pick-me-up, the absolute best,” she said, “was the classic cocktail called the Electric Current Fizz”

The cocktail, which appears in George Kappeler’s 1895 treatise, “Modern American Drinks,” is in two parts: a Silver Fizz — a tall cocktail made of gin, lemon juice, sugar, an egg white and soda water — paired with a variation on the Prairie Oyster. Kappeler instructs readers to make the fizz first and to “save the yolk of the egg and serve it in the half-shell, with a little pepper, salt and vinegar.” Packard recommends a few lashings of Worcestershire and Tabasco instead of vinegar. “Shoot the yolk,” she says, “then enjoy the fizz at your own pace.”