Peanut butter recalls. Spinach scares. Contaminated meat.

Is it any wonder Americans are jittery about their food? so much so that when the associated Press recently ran a recipe for traditional spaghetti carbonara — complete with its only barely cooked egg — e-mails poured in.

Had we forgotten the step in the recipe about cooking the egg? no. but it did make us wonder. with so many traditional recipes calling for uncooked eggs — mayonnaise, Caesar salad, eggnog, carbonara, never mind the simple joy of dunking toast in soft-boiled eggs — what can we safely do with raw eggs?

Simply put, raw eggs can carry salmonella, bacteria that can cause serious food poisoning, even death. but to be fair, any raw food can be contaminated. Salmonella is what triggered the massive peanut butter recall last year.

The Food and Drug Administration is clear on the matter, telling people eggs should be fully cooked until the yolks and the whites are firm. They tell people not to eat or even taste any foods that may contain raw or undercooked eggs.

The risks are highest among the very young, the elderly and people who are pregnant or have a compromised immune system, says Catherine Donnelly, a professor and expert on the microbiology of food safety at the University of Vermont. Healthy adults may get sick from salmonella, but Donnelly says they are unlikely to die.

Still, not dying is a pretty low bar to set for dinner. Is it worth it?

Charles Reeves, chef and owner of Penny Cluse Cafe, a restaurant in Burlington, Vt., known for its from-scratch breakfasts and lunches, certainly thinks so. “You can’t own a restaurant and call yourself a chef if you’re using mayonnaise out of a bottle,” he says. “It’s just too easy to make it better yourself.”

In Reeves’ kitchen, the ubiquitous dressing (made with raw yolks and sometimes the whites) is prepared daily and used on numerous sandwiches. Raw eggs also show up in the base for several other dressings and sauces.

“You just always have to use absolutely fresh eggs that come from a reputable source,” he says.

But Todd Pritchard, a food scientist at the University of Vermont, says farm fresh doesn’t necessarily mean bacteria free. “Bacteria are blind,” he says. “They don’t see whether the eggs come from a local farmer or are free-range or organic.”

Much depends on how the eggs and chickens have been handled, says Pritchard. An unhealthy chicken can have salmonella in its reproductive tract, and the bacteria can end up on the shell or inside the egg.

According the American Egg Board, the risk of an egg being contaminated with salmonella is only around 1 in 20,000. at this rate, an average consumer would encounter a contaminated egg once in 84 years.

But that doesn’t matter, Pritchard points out, if you’re the one who gets sick.

So what’s an egg eater to do?

For adult home cooks in good health, the minute risk of being sickened may be worth the joy of soft boiled eggs or homemade mayo. Ditto when dining out.

Still not so sure? Pasteurized egg products are available. Whites are common, but yolks are hard to find. but many of these products are made mostly from egg whites, which don’t emulsify or thicken well.