Eggnog

• 1. Introduction

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  Eggnog is a rich, chilled, frothy drink built from milk or cream, sugar and whipped eggs, and across Canada and the United States it marks the stretch of weeks from American Thanksgiving to the end of Christmas. Supermarkets stock it in cartons. Home cooks whisk it from scratch. Many of them add brandy, rum or bourbon. Yet this cozy seasonal drink once turned a Christmas gathering of young cadets into a scandal that people still retell. How did a cup of eggs, cream and liquor come to carry such a strange name? Why did people ever drink it raw, and what happens when they do? And what did the drink look like before anyone in America had tasted it?

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• 2. The Mystery Of The Name

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  The Oxford English Dictionary points to East Anglia, where nog was the word for a strong beer brewed there. Another theory ties nog to noggin, a Middle English word for a small carved wooden mug used to serve alcohol. British drinkers also called the drink an Egg Flip, because the mixture was flipped, or poured rapidly, between two pitchers to blend it. One dictionary treats the word as an Americanism coined between 1765 and 1775.

  Frederick Douglass Opie, a professor at Babson College, favors a tidier story. In colonial slang, rum was grog, and bartenders served it in small wooden mugs called noggins. So the drink was first egg-n-grog and later eggnog. Ben Zimmer, executive editor for vocabulary.com, disputes this because nothing proves it. He suggests nog may relate to the Scottish nugg, or nugged ale, which meant ale warmed with a hot poker.

  The earliest known use of the word dates to 1775. That year Jonathan Boucher, a clergyman and philologist in Maryland, wrote a poem about the drink, and it stayed unpublished until thirty years after his death. Its speaker praises morning fog-drams and, better still, egg-nogg. Print came later. On the 26th of March 1788, the New-Jersey Journal mentioned a young man drinking a glass of it. The word may be young, but the drink behind it could be far older, and monks may have known its ancestor.

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• 3. From Posset To Punch

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  In the Middle Ages, people drank posset, a hot beverage of milk curdled with wine or ale and flavored with spices. They took it as a remedy for colds and flu. Some recipes added eggs, and TIME magazine reports that by the 13th century monks were known to drink a posset with eggs and figs. The drink stayed popular from medieval times into the 19th century.

  In Britain, the drink belonged mostly to the aristocracy. Milk, eggs and sherry were foods of the wealthy, so eggnog often appeared in toasts to prosperity and good health. Anyone who could get milk and eggs mixed them with brandy, Madeira or sherry. The result resembled modern alcoholic eggnog.

  The 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm, in chapter 21, describes a version it calls a Hell's Angel. It contains an egg, two ounces of brandy, a teaspoonful of cream and some chips of ice, and the characters serve it as breakfast.

  During the 18th century, the drink crossed the Atlantic to the British colonies. Brandy and wine were heavily taxed there, so rum from the Triangular Trade with the Caribbean made a cheaper substitute. Cheap liquor and plentiful farm and dairy products made the drink a hit in America. After the American Revolutionary War reduced rum shipments to the newly founded United States, Americans turned to domestic whiskey, and eventually to bourbon in particular. Eggnog became tied to the holidays after its adoption in the 1700s. George Washington, the first US President, is on record as serving visitors an eggnog-like drink with rye whiskey, rum and sherry.

  Isaac Weld, Junior, recorded the habit in his travel book, published in 1800 and covering the years 1795-1796 and 1797. American travellers, he wrote, each took a hearty draught of egg-nog before setting out, as was the custom. His recipe called for new milk, eggs, rum and sugar, beaten together.

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• 4. Cousins And Imitators

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  In the American South, eggnog is made with bourbon, but the family spreads much wider. In Puerto Rico the drink is called coquito and is made with rum and fresh coconut juice or coconut milk. Mexican eggnog goes by rompope and was developed in Santa Clara. It uses Mexican cinnamon along with rum or grain alcohol. In Peru it is called biblia con pisco, after the pomace brandy known as pisco.

  Germany has its own versions. Biersuppe is a German eggnog made with beer. Eierpunsch uses white wine, eggs, sugar, cloves, tea, lemon or lime juice and cinnamon. A recipe dating from 1904 calls for eggs, lemon juice, sugar, white wine, water and rum. In Iceland, eggnog is served hot as a dessert. The Dutch liqueur advocaat, long sold in bottles at around 20% alcohol, is essentially an eggnog as well.

  Heat gave the drink another famous form in the 1820s. The British journalist Pierce Egan invented the Tom and Jerry, which adds brandy and rum to eggnog and is served hot in a mug or a bowl. It was once very popular, and it kept turning up in popular culture. Damon Runyon's 1932 short story "Dancing Dan's Christmas" features it prominently. Characters drink Tom and Jerrys in the 1940 film Beyond Tomorrow and the 1941 film The Great Mr. Nobody. Yogi Yorgesson's 1949 novelty song "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas" mentions it, as does the 1960 film The Apartment. Some of the strongest eggnogs, however, came from American kitchens in the 19th century.

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• 5. The Eggnog Riot

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  One 19th century American recipe, quoted by CNN, called for three dozen eggs, half a gallon of domestic brandy and another half-pint of French brandy. TIME magazine reminds modern drinkers to mind the alcohol in their eggnog. In 19th-century Baltimore, young men made New Year's Day rounds from house to house, toasting each host with eggnog. The challenge was to finish the rounds still standing.

  The most notorious episode played out at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, from the 23rd to the 25th of December 1826. The academy prohibited alcohol, and drunkenness or intoxication could lead to expulsion. By 1826, officials worried that drinking was getting out of hand among the 260 cadets. The cadets were told that their Christmas eggnog would be alcohol-free because of the ban.

  They answered by smuggling gallons of whiskey into the barracks to spike the eggnog for a Christmas Day party. The party became a drunken free-for-all. Windows, furniture and crockery were smashed, banisters were torn from walls and fights broke out. One cadet, befuddled by the eggnog, tried to shoot his commanding officer and failed.

  The fallout was a court-martial for twenty cadets and one enlisted soldier. Two famous names were at the academy that night, the young Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Neither was found guilty of any offence or expelled.

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• 6. Raw Eggs, Real Risk

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  In 1982, most of the residents and staff of a nursing home in the United States fell ill with salmonellosis, and four of them died. The cause was almost certainly an eggnog made on the spur of the moment. Some further cases came from a secondary outbreak, spread when people with contaminated hands handled food later.

  Most homemade recipes have historically used raw eggs. Alcohol acts as a bactericide, but eggnog made from raw eggs carrying salmonella and left unheated can still cause food poisoning. A later US Food and Drug Administration publication stated that the alcohol in eggnog does not sterilize contaminated eggs. Pasteurized eggs solve the problem. So does heating the milk-egg mixture gently, without boiling, until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Some cooks cook the yolks with milk into a custard first.

  Time offers a different cure. Aged alcoholic eggnog, sometimes kept for as long as a year, is said to taste much better and to destroy pathogens. In 2010 the Rockefeller University Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology tested this by adding salmonella to a strong eggnog and storing it in the refrigerator. A week later the drink still held dangerous levels of the bacteria. Within three weeks they were gone. Safety guidance recommends at least 20% alcohol, roughly equal parts spirits and milk or cream, plus refrigeration. Regulators have also shaped what the commercial carton contains.

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• 7. Cartons And Plant-Based Nog

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  Traditional eggnog combines milk or cream, sugar, raw eggs, a spirit and spices, often vanilla or nutmeg. Cooks top it with grated nutmeg or ground cinnamon. Ready-made versions arrive seasonally with different spirits or none at all. Some are mixes holding everything but the liquor, so the buyer adds it. Some modern commercial eggnogs add gelatin and other thickeners and use less egg and cream. Traditional eggnog carries a lot of fat and sugar, so low-fat and sugar-free versions exist.

  For concerns about selling products made from raw eggs and milk, the FDA has changed its definition of eggnog several times, toward artificial replacements for the many eggs once used. As of January 2015, regulations required at least 1% egg yolk solids and at least 8.25% milk solids. Under current US law, products sold as eggnog may also contain carrageenan, guar gum, monoglycerides, colorings and natural and artificial flavorings. The flavor has spread beyond the carton, into coffee as an eggnog latte, into tea, and into egg-custard puddings and eggnog-flavored ice cream.

  Non-dairy eggnog has a longer history than most shoppers expect. In 1899, Almeda Lambert's Guide for Nut Cookery gave a recipe for Egg Nog made with coconut cream, eggs and sugar. In 1973, Eunice Farmilant's The Natural Foods Sweet-Tooth Cookbook offered a more modern version. It called for 3 eggs separated, 2 tablespoons of barley malt extract or Amasake syrup, 4 cups of chilled soy milk, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and nutmeg.

  In 1981, Grain Country of Los Angeles, California, introduced Grain Nog, the earliest non-dairy and vegan eggnog. It was based on amazake, a traditional Japanese fermented rice beverage, contained no eggs, and came in plain, strawberry and carob flavors. That same year, Redwood Valley Soyfoods Unlimited of California launched Soynog, the earliest known soy-based vegan eggnog, using soy milk and tofu for thickness. It was renamed Lite Nog in 1982 and Tofu Nog in 1985.

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