ISSUE 33, VIRGINIA, Part 4: Eggnog's Home
Eggnog
My mother had a revulsion for eggnog. She didn’t drink alcohol, so the rum/bourbon/brandy that spiked the bowl foreclosed it. And the punch base—milk, cream, sugar, eggs (whites whipped and separate yolks incorporated)—had a surfeit of fat and calories. Even the permissions of the holidays could not tempt her from her prudence regarding shape and weight. But my father had no such scruples, and a brimming bowl dusted with nutmeg and a ladle with an ample mouth welcomed the guests to our house at Christmastide. As kids we had the unspiked version, poured direct from premixed cartons, and then a dash of nutmeg to get the kiss of spice. I sort of liked it.
It wasn’t until I went to college at William & Mary and began haunting colonial Williamsburg that I began to grasp the extent to which our forbears loved milk as a carrier of alcohol. I tasted syllabub (milk, cream, sugar frothed and given an edge by citric acid—no eggs), a traditional milk punch (whole milk, brandy, a simple syrup, vanilla, and nutmeg or cinnamon—no eggs), a sack posset (a combination of fortified wine, beaten eggs and milk or cream, sugar & spice, and heated with a red hot poker to alter the consistency of some of the ingredients to that of custard. I also had Flip (ale, rum, eggs and sugar, also heated with a hot poker—no cream or milk). None of these old English beverages was egg nog. But you can see how that constellation of beverages might give rise to it. For suddenly it is there—in the 1760s in colonial Maryland & Virginia, and by 1800 it has firmly established itself as THE Christmas tipple for mixed company. Although one learned commentator in the 1820s believed eggnog to be Flemish in origin, by the first decades of the 19th century it had become known as an American drink. Indeed when the American negotiators of the end of the War of 1812 in Ghent hosted a party on New Year’s Day 1815 to mark the official end of the conflict they dispensed egg nog to the foreign diplomatic corps as a home concoction.
An important dimension of egg nog was its gender neutrality. Syllabub was decidedly a chick drink in the 18th and early 19th century, Flip and Arrack punches were associated with the all male city clubs. But eggnog stood half way between the two beverage spheres—a contact zone in a bowl. It’s broad popularity and connection with Christmas made eggnog particularly troubling to the temperance advocates in the early republic. It was such a social and amiable drink that it was Satan’s most subtle seduction.
So if you need the spice of sin as well as nutmeg to flavor your holiday nogging, I have included below a song of warning composed in Virginia for Christmas 1817. “Beware of Egg Nog!” What exactly was the Virginia formula for eggnog that gave rise to such dire possibilities. Fortunately we have a splendid and wonderfully cultish recipe from the Westmoreland Club in Virginia. I included that recipe below. I have declined to include the faddish summer drink of 1890, frozen eggnog as something too decadent to consider during the holidays.