The Egg Also Nogs

Eggnog is prominent on supermarket shelves this time of year. Homemade is vastly better, but I’m much too lazy to make it from scratch these days, so it catches my attention. I rarely buy it, however, because a glass contains as many calories as a lumberjack’s breakfast. (I do little calorie-counting, but there are some items that shout out for it.) As a kid I loved the stuff (the nonalcoholic variety, of course) and I still like it. Ready-made nonalcoholic eggnog is a relatively recent product, appearing in markets in the late 1940s. Add your booze of choice for the adult version. Maybe sometime before New Year I’ll skip breakfast and have one or two – with or without the ethanol.

As it happens, the first alcoholic drink I ever had was eggnog. It was on a warm evening in Islamorada Florida during a family vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I was 8. A dozen adults, my parents among them, were gathered under a beachside gazebo and had served themselves nog. A cup was handed to me before my mom sampled it and realized it was spiked. At this late date, I have no idea with what, but given the company and location it probably was rum. “Oh, it won’t hurt him,” my dad said. “There isn’t much in it.” My mom let it go. There wasn’t much in it either, as it had no noticeable effect whatsoever, though of course I wasn’t allowed a refill. That’s all there was to it. A decade later my relationship with alcohol became more complicated.

Sumerian kegger with straws

Humanity itself got a much earlier taste. Great apes today seek out fermented fruits, which can have as much as 5% alcohol content – about the same as beer. There is every reason to suppose hominins did the same. The natural supply always was limited. When human ingenuity removed those limits, humanity’s relationship with ethanol became more complicated. 8000-year-old shards of pottery from sites in the Middle East, China, and Georgia (Transcaucasian Georgia, not the one it’s a rainy night in) contain traces of beer, mead, and wine. Since this timing coincides with the advent of farming, some anthropologists have argued that the reason humans adopted farming (which is harder work than hunting and gathering while providing a less healthy diet) was not for food but for an abundant supply of grains for beer; if so, the credit (or, some might say, the blame) for civilization belongs to brewers. The first written records appear in Sumer 5000 years ago, and among them is a recipe for beer. Beer powered the overachieving masons in ancient Egypt as well. The classical Greco-Roman world favored wine. Asian cultures favored rice wine. In the Middle Ages playful Arab and European alchemists discovered how to distill powerful spirits.

A useful and compendious history of humanity’s love/hate affair with alcohol, by the way, is Drink: a Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately, though he has little to say about eggnog in particular.

Eggs and alcohol don't seem to have been a popular mix in ancient times, though Pliny the Elder does mention it as a cure for alcoholism. He tells us that owl eggs aged for three days in wine "produce distaste for it." Posset, something very much like eggnog, appears in the historical record in England in the 1300s. It was a mixture of eggs, figs, and ale. It didn't cure alcoholism. As the years passed, experimenters swapped out ale for sherry and then hard liquor. Other additives besides figs were tried. The word “eggnog” turns up in 18^th century dictionaries, which means it is probably older. It apparently derives from the words egg and grog, and the recipe by then was essentially the same as today. Then as now the choice of liquor was a matter of personal preference. George Washington preferred a mix. He offered the following recipe:

One quart cream, one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, pint rye whiskey, pint Jamaica rum, pint sherry — mix liquor first, then separate yolks and whites of 12 eggs, add sugar to beaten yolks, mix well. Add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and fold slowly into mixture. Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently.

George’s eggnog packs a lot more punch than whatever I drank at age 8, which likely contained just a splash of Bacardi’s. If it is the one concocted surreptitiously at West Point, however, it explains the Eggnog Riot of 1826 in which 90 drunk cadets broke dishes, windows, and bannisters. All were disciplined but only 11 were expelled, which is a much milder response than I would expect today. Perhaps the Superintendent figured the morning after was its own punishment. I’ve never experienced one, but I understand eggnog hangovers are brutal.

George wasn’t the only President to share an eggnog recipe. Dwight Eisenhower was a bourbon man: one dozen egg yolks, one pound of granulated sugar, one quart of bourbon, one quart of coffee cream and one quart of whipping cream.

Bourbon is good, but if I ever get ambitious enough to make eggnog from scratch at home and pour a quart [.95 liter] of it in there as per Ike’s instructions, I’ll repeat my age-8 experience of stopping after one cup.

Straight No Chaser - Who Spiked the Eggnog?