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 18th 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?
I like Egg Nog well enough. Is that Sumerian keggers or are they indeed...aliens? I've been watching some of these UFO shows on, of all things, The History Channel. They have all the same old, I use the word kindly, "experts". Its amazing that they always find ways to relate anything to aliens from another world. I think I'd rather have a skeptic involved in all that to dispute their claims or maybe an entire show on how the UFO phenomena is bogus.
ReplyDeleteHa ha. It's even scarier when they show up on the Science Channel. Leaving aside that many of these experts earn their living from hawking their views (the same can be said of most legit experts in any field, after all), one may more charitably conclude that cognitive bias is at work: the tendency to emphasize evidence that supports one's preconceived opinions and ignore evidence that contradicts them.
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