From the Vault: Eggnog
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It is Christmas Eve for many of you. And so we are off this week. Instead of a new episode, we have an older episode. This one originally published 12-15-2022. It is our invention-style episode on eggnog. Get into the history of eggnog and a little bit into the science of eggnog as well. So let's pour up a glass and sip it down. ♪

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. It's that time of year again. And by that time, I mean it is the holidays. We're knee deep, perhaps waist deep.

in the holidays and there's no going back. We might as well just push forward at this point. Like it's just as much effort to keep going as it would be to turn back. So once more, we have a holiday episode for you. It's actually gonna be our third installment in our holiday invention series.

where we more or less give the invention treatment to various holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year, we're going to be looking in earnest at eggnog. Is eggnog an invention? Sure, we can stretch the definition. I think that's okay. I think so. I mean, we did an invention, a full-blown invention episode about the Mai Tai.

Oh, okay. In which we had Jeff Beach Bambari on as a guest to talk about that. Eggnog is not something that occurs naturally in the world. It must be made. At some point, there had to be a first or something like a first, and we'll get into that. And it's one of those things that has a number of different customs and cultural details surrounding it.

Now, Joe, I'm not sure what your relationship with eggnog happens to be, because I don't know that we've ever really spoken about this. I don't think we've had eggnog together before. Not that I recall.

But my family's general approach is we'll generally buy a carton of almond nog each year, largely for our son because he gets super into it. And if I have a chance to visit like an upscale cocktail place or a nice restaurant, then I will jump at the opportunity to order an eggnog if they have one on the menu. Yeah.

In the past, I've made it down to New Orleans for the start of Beach Bum Berry's Sippin' Santa festivities at Beach Bum Berry's Latitude 29. They also have pop-ups all over the place. And they'll generally have at least one holiday tiki beverage on there that is at least eggnog-esque in form.

I'm picturing piles of crushed or pellet ice with kind of a frothy, creamy rhyme about them and some nutmeg sprinkled over top. Oh, yeah. The nutmeg, as we'll discuss, is pretty essential.

So I did make it down there this year, but I did make it over to a tiki bar in our area, Decatur's SOS Tiki Bar, and I enjoyed a frozen take on the classic eggnog. It's generally a rich drink, though. So once, twice, three times per year max, that's generally enough for me. Uh-huh.

Now, before we came in here, though, I mentioned to my wife that I was about to record the eggnog episode, and she was kind enough to provide me with an entire glass of eggnog here for me to consume during this episode. The listeners at home, you'll have to take my word for it. Joe, I think you can see it on the video feed here. Wait, is this full booze eggnog? Well, you might well presume that, but I couldn't possibly comment. Okay.

Yes. Creamy, rich, hint of nutmeg. Beautiful. I have no eggnog in the house. What? Cue Joe Pesci in Home Alone saying, eggnog, eggnog, dressed as a cop. Like, eggnog is the most disgusting substance on earth. And you know what? As a child, that was pretty much where my head was at. I was like, yeah, Joe Pesci in Home Alone is correct. I found the idea revolting. Not just revolting. I think I...

I think I probably found it borderline nauseating to think of a drink made out of eggs. Something changed over the years. Now I find it quite delightful. So it was the eggs that threw you off?

Yeah, well, you're going to drink eggs? I don't know. So I think about eggs. There's something that I, you know, I like eggs scrambled like they make them at the cracker barrel. You know, I'm thinking of like a thick yellow curd-like substance and always in savory context. I mean, I know obviously now that eggs are used in all kinds of baking and sweet context, but that's not how I thought about them when I was a kid. So the idea of drinking a sweet egg-based beverage was crazy.

vile to my brain. I can understand that. I mean, even the name is a bit potentially off-putting. It's very forward with the egg. What you're about to drink contains eggs. And then the nog also can throw one for a cur.

I do like some of the archaic spellings of eggnog that I've encountered researching this episode. Oftentimes, the way we encounter it now, it's E-G-G-N-O-G, but some of these other spellings will be E-G-G-N-O-G-G. I like the double Gs occurring in both parts of the word. That's just symmetry. That's good branding. Yes. Now, before we proceed, I guess we should go ahead and drive home exactly what eggnog is. We've alluded to it a little bit already, but technically...

It's a milk egg drink or a milk egg punch. And we've, of course, reached the point as a civilization where you can have something that is identifiable as a nog without the presence of egg or dairy. But historically, this is the realm from which this beverage arises. Right. So you mentioned almond nog. I guess that is equivalent in the same way that you might have almond milk. It is a substitute for milk.

Yeah, though I guess it's even more like some people get up in arms, especially the dairy industry. I know about things that are not milk calling themselves milk. And even more to the point, I guess, something like a soy nog or an almond nog is going to have neither eggs nor dairy. And so it's even further removed. But yet it's still very much in the spirit of the classic nog. So I think it more than qualifies. Yeah, nog is a thick, crumbly.

creamy, sweet drink. Yes, it's a state of mind. It's a holiday tradition. Now, one of the sources I'm going to refer back to several times in this episode is the excellent book Imbibe! by David Wondrich, which is a text that we've referenced on the show in the past. It is one of, if not the best books you can pick up on the history of the American cocktail.

This is a great book. It cites, among many others, the legendary professor Jerry Thomas, who lived 1830 through 1885, the New Orleans bartender who wrote the Seminole Bartender's Guide and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general. We go into more depth on this in an older episode or episodes that we did together on mixology. I think we ended up talking about absinthe a lot in those. Yeah, that would make sense.

And I know Jerry Thomas also comes up in the recent episode on ice, the interview that I did. But according to Wondrich, basic milk punches go back to the late 1600s. And to give you an example of what a milk punch consists of, and again, this is not an egg milk punch, this is just a milk punch.

Wondrich includes a recipe from Jerry Thomas. Jerry Thomas would have brought together a bunch of these different recipes for drinks and put them in his own book at the time. This particular recipe from Jerry Thomas calls for sugar, water, brandy, rum, and shaved ice. A little nutmeg goes on top.

And, uh, Wondrich includes a quote from, uh, this is an 1873 quote from the Brooklyn Eagle, uh, that states that this punch was, quote, the surest thing in the world to get drunk on and so fearfully drunk that you won't know whether you are a cow yourself or some other foolish thing.

That's good. Now, one thing I have to point out is that when you listed the ingredients, you did not list milk. So I assume these are the things that are added to the milk? Yes, yes. Okay. Yeah, the milk would also be an important part of this. So already we're kind of in the territory of what we think of when we think about eggnog. But of course, there are no eggs there.

Now, when it comes to eggnog itself, Thomas was very much of the opinion that eggnog was, quote, a beverage of American origin. And Wondrich states that, quote, the drink's earliest mentions come from a 1788 Philadelphia newspaper, and all the other mentions are American.

And if early European travelers to the United States viewed it as one of the novelties Americans were inflicting on the art of drinking, by the 1860s it was a drink of comfortable middle age with a wide, if strictly seasonal, popularity. When Thomas added that in the North, quote, it is a favorite of all seasons, he was certainly overstating the case.

So you bring up that mention in the 1788 newspaper, and this name drop of eggnog as a recipe is also referenced in a great source I found that was aimed at unearthing the etymological history of eggnog. Because it's obvious why the word egg is in the name. There are eggs in it. But what exactly is a nog? Could, as the Simpsons proposed, you equally whip up a cauldron of corn nog?

Cornog sounds kind of delicious. Like it brings to mind like corn puddings. I think it occurs in the Simpsons episode with the hurricane when the stores are, there's a run on the, the quickie mart and the only things left on the shelves are corn nog and wadded beef. Yeah.

But anyway, diving into the history and etymology of eggnog or corn nog, whatever, what have you, any nogs. My source here is a December 2009 article called The Origins of Eggnog, Holiday Grog.

By the American linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer, who is brother of the excellent science writer Carl Zimmer, who's been a guest on the show before. Huh, crazy. So here's what Ben Zimmer says about Nog. The word Nog first shows up as a regional term in England, specifically in the region of East Anglia. So this is the eastern part of the country containing Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire.

And it referred that term there referred to a type of beer. We know this because of a letter written from the county of Norfolk in the year 1693 by a man named Humphrey Perdue, who described, quote, a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country they call nog. So nog is high gravity beer. It's strong stuff.

But to take one step back, why would the East Anglians call strong beer nog Zimmer identifies a couple of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from the word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated slang for head for your head. Uh,

But before that, noggin meant a small mug or a small drink of spirits. So perhaps noggin was shortened to nog, and it came to refer to the beer inside the mug instead of the mug itself. And we do that kind of metonymy with words today, like, did you have wine? Oh, I drank two glasses. You're not saying you literally drank the glass. The glasses mean the wine inside the glass. Right.

But another idea is that the word nog for strong beer comes from a Scottish word, nug, or nugged ale, which means ale that you heat up by sticking a hot poker in it, which is funny enough to imagine in itself. But I can also see how that would correspond to a drink with strong alcohol content because drinks with higher alcohol content are often said to taste warm or even to burn. Yeah.

Yeah, this is interesting. It brings to mind the images of some of these older drinks where you would stick the hot poker or some sort of hot metal into it. I think there's a scene in the excellent TV series The Nick where you see some of the characters getting a drink of this fashion.

Okay, so, so far we've got the idea that you start with either a little mug called a noggin or a type of beer warmed with a hot poker called a nug. And somehow one of these terms gets ported over into this East Anglian word nog, which means strong beer. But how does that actually get connected to the sweet, milky, eggy drink we are familiar with?

We don't know for sure. But the link in the chain seems to be alcohol. Because while you can buy kid-friendly nog in the dairy aisle these days, everything I've been reading suggests that early eggnog was boozy. That was a primary characteristic of what the nog was. It had a lot of alcohol in it. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what I saw in all of my research. Nobody's talking about eggnog as something that is then spiked. It is inherently spiked.

And Zimmer reports that a Maryland clergyman named Jonathan Boucher is alleged to have written the first known reference to eggnog in a poem in 1775. But this poem was not published until about 30 years later, so we don't know when it was actually written for sure. But the relevant section of the poem goes like this.

Fog drams in the morn, or better still, egg nog. This is Nog with two Gs. At night, hot suppings, and at midday grog, my palate can regale.

So you see the context here is fully alcoholic. Grog refers to a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Then there's that line, fog drams in the morn, or better still, eggnog. A dram usually refers to a small drink of whiskey. And according to Merriam-Webster, fog drams are, quote, drams resorted to on the pretense of their protecting from the danger of fog. Yeah.

I'm sorry, boss. I had to have another whiskey before work or the fog could have killed me on the way here.

All right. Well, yeah, this is making sense as an early morning drink, though, because you get your fog protection. You get a couple of eggs in there, maybe. You know, this is a breakfast that you're drinking down. Exactly. So Boucher may have written that in 1775. It's hard to say for sure. But according to Zimmer, the earliest rock solid references to eggnog,

where we know the date of their publication, appear in a handful of newspapers in the year 1788, as you mentioned earlier. Now, one is a March 1788 report in the New Jersey Journal, which, and I love that this is what some newspaper articles consisted of at the time. It says, a young man with a cormorant appetite, meaning like gluttonous appetite,

A young man with a cormorant appetite voraciously devoured last week at Connecticut Farms 30 raw eggs, a glass of eggnog, and another of brandy sling. Yeah, is this what newspapers were back in the day? Did you have like a gluttony page where you're like, what's everybody overeating in New Jersey? Stop the presses. We've got to get this story, this hot story about the guy who ate 30 eggs in there.

Okay, so whatever eggnog is at the time he had some. Another article is from October 1788 in the Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia, where a writer was complaining about an upset stomach and wrote, quote, when wine and beer punch and eggnog meat instantly ensues a quarrel. There's wisdom to that, I think.

Yeah, I've only ever heard the liquor before beer kind of thing. I've never heard it taken out to four different things with like punch and eggnog in there. You know, we're looking back at a time when drinking was a little more robust throughout the country, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, I love the fact that newspapers not only used to report on what some guy ate at a farm, but also what gave me an upset tummy. So it sounds like an alcoholic beverage known as eggnog was in common parlance in the colonies and the young United States in the late 18th century.

But Zimmer also documents how an early example of eggnog was associated with Christmas celebration by citing a piece in the Virginia Chronicle from January 1793, which reads as follows. On last Christmas Eve, several gentlemen met at Northampton Courthouse and spent the evening in mirth and festivity when eggnog was the principal liquor used by the company.

After they had indulged pretty freely in this beverage, a gentleman in the company offered a bet that not one of the party could write four verses extempore, which should be rhyme and sense. Okay. He's like, we're so drunk. I bet none of you can write four lines of poetry that will make sense and rhyme. So what did they come up with? Well, one guy belts out the following.

tis eggnog now whose golden streams dispense far richer treasures to the ravished sense the muse from wine derives a transient glare but eggnog's draughts afford her solid fare

Hmm. So move over wine. The muses are no longer interested in you. Now they will only be singing to people who are chugging eggnog. Eggnog doesn't seem to have a personification though. Like there's no like Seder of eggnog. Right. The Dionysus of eggnog. Yeah. He was before its time. I think he would have approved of eggnog, especially based on these historical references to eggnog.

So do we know exactly what they were putting in eggnog at the time? Well, there's a book from 1799 called travels through the States of North America and the provinces of upper and lower Canada during the year, 1795, 96 and 97 by an Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld. And this passage actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing, I think David Wondrich, who said that, uh,

that sometimes people from Europe might encounter eggnog and think, oh, what crimes they're committing against the drinking culture here in the Americas. And I wonder if there's a little bit of that kind of raised eyebrow going on in this passage, but we'll see what you think. So Weld is writing about a stop at an inn near Baltimore, Maryland, where he writes, quote,

Several travelers had stopped at the same house that I did the first night I was on the road, and we all breakfasted together preparatory to setting out the next morning. The American travelers, before they pursued their journey, took a hearty draft each, according to custom, of eggnog, a mixture composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar beat up together.

So eggnog, it should be heavy, sweet, exploding with alcohol, drunk in large quantities in the morning before setting out on a long journey. Okay.

Yeah, this is, I mean, it really, it forces you to rethink eggnog because I think a lot of people are probably like, like me, you grew up exposed to, again, the grocery store eggnog. And there's this kind of sense that eggnog is this drink for everybody. Eggnog is this drink for kids. And as you get older, then you're perhaps in a situation where you can have the eggnog with something added to it. Eggnog plus, uh, you know, if you like, but, uh,

But the historical truth of eggnog is, no, this is the thing that the really drunken adults are having, sometimes first thing in the morning. Also, regarding famous eggnog recipes from the early days of the United States…

There is a famous recipe for eggnog that is alleged to come from George Washington's kitchen papers. You'll find this if you Google George Washington's eggnog. I've seen some serious doubt cast upon its origins, like whether it was actually Washington's

But according to the farmer's almanac, this famous recipe goes as follows. It's one quart cream, one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, half a pint rye whiskey, half a pint Jamaica rum, and a quarter pint sherry. And then you mix the liquor.

separate the yolks and the whites of 12 eggs, add sugar to the beaten yolks, mix well. Then you add milk and cream slowly beating, beat the whites of the eggs until stiff peaks form, then fold slowly into the mixture. Then you let it sit in a cool place for several days. Then quote, taste frequently. Yeah.

And I could be wrong, but I believe this is the recipe that our colleague Alex Williams uses when he makes his famous eggnog for all of our coworkers. Yes, it definitely is. This is definitely the recipe he would use, and it is quite delightful. But yeah, I encountered the same thing looking at the actual history of this. There's some doubt as to whether George Washington actually served this recipe.

And then there are some accounts that say, well, it looks like maybe there's evidence that eggnog was served at Mount Vernon. But as far as the precise recipe, I don't know that there's a lot of data to back that up. Though we will touch on at least one former U.S. president who did have a recipe for eggnog and did serve it and drink it.

All right. All this being said, before we proceed with eggnog, I think we can at least consider the possibility of predecessors. That, yes, even if eggnog is something that emerges in North America, there are at least things not unlike eggnog that one can encounter, say, in at least late medieval and post-medieval Europe. Oh, yes. Some gorgeous textures to imagine. Yeah. So let's go back to the late Middle Ages and drink some hard milk.

So European holiday traditions, which of course inform holiday traditions in colonial America and beyond, are a mix of Christian traditions, more ancient traditions, and a great deal of regional variability.

I was, in fact, just researching the Hooden or Hoden horse of Kent for the Monster Facts series, and I think that's a great example of this. It brings to mind various costume street-wandering traditions, as well as caroling and wassailing. Wassail, of course, is a door-to-door ritualistic and communal hot drink that typically contained mulled cider, ale or wine, and spices. Mm-hmm.

But then there is the tradition of the posset. Posset. The posset, yes. The Smithsonian Magazine website has a nice article about this titled, Past the Posset, Colon, the Medieval Eggnog by Lisa Braman. And according to this article, it apparently dates back to late medieval Europe. And it looks like some of the examples come to us from the post-medieval world and beyond.

Anyway, the posset itself is a drinking vessel, as Braman points out. And you see mention of it even in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth poisons the possets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters. Oh, I forgot about that.

I had as well. When the author here brings it up, I'm like, oh yeah, I do remember that line vaguely. But you encounter so many archaic words if you're reading or performing Shakespeare that you can't stop to wonder over all of them. It's enough to be like, okay, this means drinking vessel. Okay, what's the next strange word that doesn't quite register for me? Let me translate that one in my head. But this is a, if you can actually look up examples of this vessel online, the posset, that's P-O-S-S-E-T,

And you'll find that some of the main examples of this, it looks curiously like an ornate teapot with handles on both sides, a wide lidded aperture at the top,

With a lid, yeah, with a lid on top. And the stem for it, you know, like a tea kettle, it feeds from the bottom of the vessel rather than from the middle or the top of the vessel. The reason for this design, according to Braman, is that you can drink directly from the stem to get at the liquid contents of the liquid it contains, but also you can take the lid off the top and go at the top of it with a spoon, because

Because basically you're going to have a mixture of things. You're going to have a fluid beneath and kind of a chunky, creamy, perhaps cheesy layer at the top. So this is like a curdled milk drink that has...

That has cheesy, floaty, solid bits on the top you want to get with a spoon? Yes. The way that Braman describes it is, quote, both a drink and a dessert with a layer of thick, sweet gruel floating above the liquid. Okay. So, okay, on one hand, I realize that could potentially be interpreted as gross, but

But on the other hand, I think it's not that different from a lot of sort of frothy dessert things we have today. I think about certain milkshakes, certain smoothies, certainly especially the older school cappuccinos where the foam cap on top was maybe a little firmer and you might have to go at that with a spoon as opposed to drinking it. So I kind of reject the idea that

that this, you know, potential hygiene issues aside of late medieval ages, I don't think this is necessarily that gross of an idea that you could have some sort of like a thick portion on the top of your beverage that requires a spoon. It's just like a little different to imagine this bizarre container for its consumption. Though nowadays, I do want to point out we do have things like the spoon straw, right?

which is usually like a plastic straw and spoon combined so that you can do both. They did not have this technology in the late medieval period, to my knowledge. Therefore, they had to use a posset. Well, you know, it is the same principle as a straw, which I don't find unusual. But I have to say it is funny to imagine somebody like drinking out of the stem of a tea kettle. Yeah, yeah, it does seem like you might burn your mouth with this.

So recorded recipes, many of these came later, I believe. They called, if you were going to fill the faucet, it would call for a great deal of egg and cream. They might also call for beer, sugar, and also thickening agents such as bread, biscuits, oatmeal, and almond paste. Hmm.

In some cases, the upper portions are said to take on a cheesy quality, which actually brings to mind modern cheese milk tea drinks, which are quite delightful. If you haven't had one, I know this is something that can be kind of hard to imagine. Why should my milk tea taste like cheese? Well, it's...

It's not what you're imagining. If you're imagining something that turns your stomach, it's not like cheddar cheese on the top of your tea. It's something sweetier and creamier, but with that slight cheesy twist to it. Not like provolone. Right, right.

Now, I should also mention there are more contemporary posset dishes, such as you often see recipes for something called a lemon posset, but this seems somewhat more refined compared to what is described here. This is not something you drink out of a strange tea kettle. It's something you spoon out of a dish. But is it eggnog? Well, in many ways, if not most ways, no. But it also sounds like the sort of thing that if you were a time traveler from an eggnog restaurant

having culture and you went back to the late medieval ages and you're like where's my eggnog and people are like what are you talking about you might discover the posset and be like oh well this will work this will do now my holiday is complete yeah it's a liquidy egg and milk or egg and cream type thing right

And I think it's not crazy to imagine that this sort of precedent for this sort of drink and the sort of taste sensations that it brings about, that this could feed into the very American traditions that would, according to Thomas, bring about the American eggnog.

So I assume after we get out of this early period where mentions are scarce and don't really explain much about eggnog, except like the Irish guy who's clearly not familiar with it. We get into a period where there is more extensive writing on eggnog, maybe like in actual cookery manuals.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot more material once you reach a certain point. And Wondrich has a whole chapter on egg drinks in his book, Imbibe, as he writes it there, quote, neither punches nor part of the lineage of cocktails. And this is also somewhat how Jerry Thomas and the people of his day would have classified them.

One of the things that really amazed me about all this, though, is that Wondridge points out that egg drinks were once far more common and kind of a daily affair, but that few survive today. This kind of comes back to your example earlier about eggnog for breakfast. Why not? Perfect. Keep the fog away, etc.,

Now, I should point out this is a 2007 book, so I'm not sure if we've seen anything in the way of a resurgence of egg drinks. It might be the case, though, given the spirit of cocktail making and its tend to re-explore older fashions and even remake them with modern twists.

I don't feel like it's tremendously uncommon to find at least a single egg drink on a fancy cocktail menu, though to be sure you probably won't find them on just random restaurant cocktail menus. Like, I don't know if Chili's offers an egg drink. I'm trying to think what are the standard egg drinks. Well, I guess there are like...

Drinks I don't usually get, but aren't there like sours and fizzes and stuff that have egg whites in them? Yeah. One of the points out that the major survivors include the 19th century Tom and Jerry drink. This would be not getting into the proportions, but it's like sugar, eggs, rum, cinnamon, cloves, allspice. There's the sherry flip, which is basically egg, sugar, and sherry.

And he discusses this elsewhere in the book, but of course there's the Ramos Gin Fizz, which is a pretty famous New Orleans drink that contains gin, simple syrup, lemon juice, lime juice, egg white, heavy cream, orange flower water, and club soda. It's one that famously requires a great deal of shaking.

You may receive a dirty look from the bartender when you order it because of all the shaking it's going to require. Sometimes they have to pass it off to another bartender to continue shaking it, but it is also a delightful drink. But yeah, Wondridge points out, though, that even though we only have so many egg drinks that kind of survived, there was this time where—

where egg-based drinks, egg-based alcoholic drinks were consumed on pretty much a daily basis and were as popular as eggnog drinks are during the holiday year round. So just imagine a world in which eggnog is stocked at the grocery store year round to meet people's demand for it and everybody's having it boozed up. Not that they bought it at the grocery store, they made it. You get my point.

That sounds like a magical time. A very rich, rich time. Yeah.

But as Paul Clark points out in the Imbibe magazine article, elements, egg cocktails, changing tastes and salmonella scares pretty much chased raw eggs out of the bar. And this would be the reason that only so many egg drinks kind of survived this period of time, in which on one hand, you got changing tastes. You can imagine perhaps there are new fads in cocktails, new ingredients are more readily available for cocktails.

And then there's this whole issue of salmonella. Salmonella concerns, of course, remain relevant to this day, and we'll come back to those in just a few minutes.

Now, Wondrich also points out there's a great deal of variation when it came to eggnog recipes, which I imagine is going to be the case with any popular drink, even if the recipe isn't secret. See the invention episode we did about the Mai Tai for examples of this on both counts. If the recipe is secret, people are going to try and recreate it. And even if there's no secret, if the recipe is well-known, you're going to end up having deviations anyway. For instance, anywhere you go today, if you're going to have a recipe that's secret,

The Mai Tai recipe, there's no telling what a restaurant will actually serve you if you order a Mai Tai, even though the original recipe is very well known at this point, or it's very easily obtained if you have a desire to seek it out. Mm-hmm.

But these regional differences in eggnog, this would really make people emotional. Wondrich points out this account where there's a judge who encountered eggnog in an inn, and it didn't have whiskey enough in it, and therefore there was this huge altercation.

Oh, yeah. I mean, again, going back to stories about inns, you don't say what time of day this is, but this eggnog might have been his morning eggnog, which sets the tone for the entire day. It's like, you know, if you don't get your coffee right in the morning, that's bad news. Yeah. If I don't get my heavily alcoholic eggnog in the morning, I'm just not, I'm no good.

Now, sometimes those regional differences, though, are going to be entirely based on what is available to you. And a great example of this is the Texian version of eggnog. It includes the recipe in the book. It stems from General Thomas Green of the Army of the Texas Republic from 1843. The recipe serves about 160. It calls for seven gallons of mezcal, seven gallons of donkey milk,

30 dozen eggs and a large loaf of sugar. I love that sugar used to come in loaves. Yeah, well, if you're making eggnog for 160, and a number of these recipes do call for large vats of eggnog, but this is quite a lot. I mean, seven gallons of mezcal, seven gallons of donkey milk. I've never tasted donkey milk. I don't even know what that would be like.

I don't know. Again, a 2007 book, but Wondrich mentioned that donkey milk was becoming popular at the time in Europe due to, supposedly it had some health advantages to it. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if it's still popular as an alternative milk. I don't think I've seen it myself in health food stores. But then again, I'm not really in the market for donkey milk.

Anyway, Wondrich roughly translates the recipe for modern drinkers in that book. He, of course, says you can use cow milk instead of donkey milk. And he also recommends grating a little chocolate on top. Mm-hmm.

Jerry Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and Wondrich includes recipes for three of them in his book. Roughly speaking, these are the contents of these three that he shares. There's Baltimore eggnog, egg sugar nutmeg, brandy or rum, wine, egg whites, and milk. There's eggnog individual, which calls for sugar, cold water, egg, cognac, Santa Cruz rum, and milk.

And then there's General Harrison's eggnog. This is 9th American President William Henry Harrison, and this was said to be one of his favorites. It called for egg, sugar, hard cider, and lumps of ice.

Important to note here that cider drinking was part of his brand. His whole image that he tried to put out was like, I'm not really at home in this whole Washington environment. I just want to sit on the porch and drink some hard cider. Won't you have some of my hard cider-based eggnog and vote for me? Yeah, that was him saying, like, I'm just a hardworking frontiersman. I'm not one of these elites. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, I...

I appreciate hard cider, but this sounds horrific. I don't think I would want any part of this. So General Harrison, no thank you. General Harrison also died about something like 30 days into his first presidential term. Yeah, he's the one who, he didn't really make it very far. And there's speculation about why he died, but one of them is that he may have succumbed to the fact that

um that the water supply at the white house at the time was heavily contaminated with raw sewage huh interesting uh i had a whole tangent for this episode about 12th u.s president zachary taylor who fell ill with a fatal illness on july 4th of 1850 after a dc dc fundraiser that he attended where he quote drank freely of iced water and chilled milk according to um

biographer K. Jack Bauer in the book Zachary Taylor, Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. So I've seen this described as copious amounts of cherries and iced milk. Apparently he preferred drinking chilled milk. That was his thing. That was the hardest drink that Zachary Taylor was known to imbibe himself.

But I cut most of this out because he wasn't drinking, as far as I can tell, a cherry chilled milk concoction. It was just chilled milk and then also a lot of cherries. And probably plenty of raw sewage. Ugh.

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Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. This is Joel and I am Matt. We are with the How to Money podcast. So Joel, you took a trip with your girls this past fall to Washington, D.C. And of course, you stayed at an Airbnb. Of course we did. We had a blast in our nation's capital. Staying at this Airbnb in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, it made everything about this trip so much more relaxed.

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Is it time for salmonella? Oh, yeah, that's a great transition. So eggs and salmonella. Salmonella remains probably the main reason people have reservations about raw egg based food and drinks today.

Salmonella is a genus of bacteria named not after salmon, the fish, but after an American veterinarian named Daniel Elmer Salmon, though it was not discovered by him. It was named after him basically because a species of salmonella was discovered by an assistant in a lab who worked for Salmon. The assistant's name was Theobald Smith, but of course the boss gets all the glory.

Some serotypes of salmonella are responsible for really serious and historically significant diseases such as typhoid fever, but multiple types of salmonella will result in infections of the intestinal tract. So salmonella infection or salmonellosis is one of the most common foodborne illnesses, often characterized by fever, diarrhea, severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and headache.

And because salmonella is often transmitted through the fecal-oral route, the risk of contracting it is higher when people don't have access to clean drinking water and effective sewage disposal. Though salmonella can also be transmitted between animals and humans, so animal vectors such as eggs from infected chickens can be a major source of salmonellosis in humans as well.

Now, on the other hand, one thing to remember is that most eggs are fine. Most eggs are not infected with salmonella. I don't know what the exact proportion is, but one figure I saw kicking around from the 2000s was a CDC estimate that roughly one in every 20,000 chicken eggs in the United States was contaminated. That number may be different today. If so, it's probably somewhat lower than that.

But, you know, I'm not saying you should go about eating raw eggs. There is definitely risk there. But also, like, the odds are pretty low that any given egg is going to make you sick.

Also, eggs are fine if you cook them to the proper temperature for the proper time. 160 degrees Fahrenheit will kill just about anything instantly. Also, even lower temperatures, if held for a sufficient amount of time, will be enough to basically sterilize eggs. You can look up charts on the amount of time eggs need to spend at a certain temperature in order to make them safe.

However, eggnog is traditionally not made with eggs that are cooked at all, but rather with raw ones. So is there any risk? Well, yes. Obviously, if you are just drinking raw eggs straight up, there is some risk of salmonella infection. One example of this, I mean, it happens all the time, but one example, one case study I dug up with an interesting secondary finding.

This is a study published in The Lancet in 1975 by Steer et al. called Person-to-Person Spread of Salmonella Typhimurium After a Hospital Common Source Outbreak. So the abstract reads, In September 1973, diarrhea caused by Salmonella typhimurium developed in 32 people in a Maine hospital.

Both epidemiological and microbiological evidence indicated that raw egg beaten in milk, for eggnog, was responsible for the infection. However, six patients and eight employees had not had eggnog, and their illness developed after the source of infection had been recognized and removed.

Most of these people had had direct contact with an infected patient and presumably acquired the infection by person-to-person spread. It's concluded that person-to-person spread of Salmonella typhimurium can occur in hospitals and can be a hazard to patients and staff. So, initially, a bunch of people in a hospital got Salmonella from drinking eggnog, but then those people gave secondary infections to others who didn't even touch the nog. Hmm.

Also, I wanted to share another medical journal article I found just because I thought it was very weird. This is called Eyelid Abscess in an Eggnog Drinker by Marcus and Wolverson, published in the British Medical Journal, 1989. Short story is a 72-year-old man showed up at a hospital in England with a huge abscess swelling on his left upper eyelid and

which they eventually determined had spread to an infection of the bone in his forehead, the area, the bone above where his eye was. So he was put under general anesthesia and the abscess was drained. They did a culture of the pus and it revealed the presence of a type of salmonella.

They eventually did another procedure to take care of the swelling in the bones of the face, and he eventually made a full recovery. The man had no gastrointestinal symptoms, and the authors say that there had been recent cases of salmonella infection related to eggs, so they asked him about his diet. And here I'm going to read from the case report. His diet consisted of West Indian and European food, but he said that he cooked all eggs well.

When he was seen in the outpatient department, he was specifically asked if he drank eggnog, and he then admitted drinking it frequently, using a recipe of raw eggs, brandy, sugar, milk, and vanilla essence.

Now, the authors say they could find no previous evidence of this particular type of salmonella causing an eyelid abscess, but that there are other known cases of this bacterial infection spreading from a gut infection originally to a secondary infection elsewhere in the body, such as in the bones, especially the long bones, especially in patients with underlying medical conditions and in patients over 70 years of age.

And finally, the authors write, quote,

Egg-borne salmonella enteroditis is destroyed by thorough cooking. The raw egg in the eggnog may have been the vehicle of infection. Unless specifically asked for, a history of eggnog drinking may not emerge on dietary questioning. But okay, now I'm sure a lot of people out there are wondering, wait a minute.

Okay, obviously, you know, you mix up a bunch of raw eggs and you just drink that. That definitely is putting you at risk. But if you put alcohol in the eggnog, surely that would be safe, right? Doesn't alcohol kill germs? Yeah, and we're talking a lot of alcohol in some of these recipes. Now, frustratingly, I have not to...

been able to put together a very clear answer on the exact relationship between alcohol content and raw egg safety. Instead, I've sort of assembled some different conflicting data points, but I'll share a few of the results I came across.

So one thing I found is a study in the International Journal of Food Microbiology published in 1990 called Survival of Pathogenic Microorganisms in an Eggnog-Like Product Containing 7% Ethanol. This is by Notermans et al. So this is a lab test. They say, let's make some boozy eggnog and directly inject pathogenic microorganisms in there and see what happens. Okay.

So they say a liquor consisting of whole egg, saccharose, meaning sugar, 25%, and ethanol of 7% was artificially contaminated with salmonella enteroditis, salmonella typhimurium, staphylococcus aureus, three different strains, bacillus cereus, and listeria.

And they say after three weeks of incubation at 22 degrees Celsius, 22 degrees Celsius is about 71 degrees Fahrenheit room temperature.

The numbers of Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, and the Listeria species they use decreased by more than 3 log base 10 units. And if I understand correctly, I believe that's a 99.9% reduction in the number of bacteria units there. They say under such conditions, however, the total number of microorganisms increased 3 log 10 units. Then

Then they say at 4 degrees Celsius, so I think this would be simulating refrigerator temperatures, the decrease of pathogenic microorganisms was much slower and a decrease of 3 log base 10 units was observed only after 7 weeks of incubation.

So this study finds eggnog without alcohol incubated at room temperature. Yeah, that's you allow populations of salmonella and staff to explode. But in this study, the presence of 7% straight ethanol significantly reduced the amount of salmonella staff and listeria over the course of three weeks at room temperature and over the course of seven weeks at fridge temperature. However, other microorganisms can grow. I'm

I'm pretty sure this recipe for eggnog that they used is the Dr. Cushing catheter recipe for eggnog with all these added diseases. You can just imagine Christopher Lee drooling over it while the Stanton twins dance. But the amount of alcohol clearly matters. One highly cited informal experiment, this was not published in a scientific journal as far as I can tell, but it was

and reported on by NPR for Science Friday. It was done in the late 2000s by microbiologists at Rockefeller University named Vince Fischetti and Raymond Shuck, and it was covered on Science Friday. And

And apparently these researchers used a recipe that the staff at the university would make every year, which originally traced back to the great American microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield. So this is her original eggnog recipe. She had worked at Rockefeller University decades earlier. Apparently they're still making her eggnog years after she passed away.

And the recipe includes raw eggs, but also cream, sugar, and a lot of hard liquor. The liquors in this version are bourbon and rum. NPR reported that the alcohol concentration of the final drink was about 20%. And the way they would do it is every year they'd make it before Thanksgiving and then enjoy it around Christmas time. So it had an incubation period in the refrigerator of about six weeks.

So for this experiment, the researchers made their usual nog, but they deliberately spiked it once again with salmonella. They're just, you can watch a video of this. They're just injecting this orange juice into the eggs. It's disgusting. Um, they say they put in the amount of salmonella you would expect from including about, uh, somewhere between one and 10 contaminated eggs. Um,

And then they took samples at various stages of preparation and incubation to see what grew over the course of the next three weeks. So egg plus salmonella with no alcohol, that's just, it formed a solid mat of salmonella, just huge boom, millions of bacteria, disgusting. Yeah, you're going to need your spoon and your posset for that one. Yeah.

Egg plus salmonella plus alcohol with the sample taken immediately after mixing give you a modest reduction, but still plenty of salmonella growth. This would still absolutely make you sick. Egg plus salmonella plus alcohol, but one day after mixing, still plenty of salmonella, but less than the one taken right after mixing. One week later, there was noticeably less bacterial growth, but they said still probably enough to make you sick.

But then the sample from three weeks later, there's nothing. No bacterial growth at all. So somewhere between one week and three weeks, this batch went from biohazard to presumably safe. Hmm.

Though I noticed that the science Friday report made a joke about like the researchers themselves are joking about this. They said, you know, we could really commit to our result and just drink it, but maybe, maybe not, which makes sense. Right? Like why risk it? And that kind of spirit comes through in a lot of the other sources I've seen talking about whether alcohol will render your eggnog safe. Yeah.

Because it seems clear there's evidence that at least in some cases, even if you got unlucky enough and got a contaminated egg, given enough alcohol and enough time, the nog would probably be safe.

But there are a lot of variables here. And so it seems like a bunch of public health and food safety sources are still cautious. They're still kind of cagey about giving the green light on this. And they default to saying that if you want to be sure you're safe, you should use pasteurized eggs from a carton, which have been rendered safe by preheating in the facility where they were packaged.

Um, or they also recommend cooking the eggs basically like sources citing experts at the FDA or the USDA say that you can't always count on alcohol to kill potential bacterial content of raw eggs. And if you want to be safe, the eggs should be cooked. You can do this by like mixing the eggs and milk together and gently bringing up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit while stirring to kill any possible bacterial content before you add the other ingredients.

So personally, I don't know exactly where we are left here. I will say it looks like some experiments do show that alcohol content is

will at least often, maybe not always, but will at least often neutralize the main bacteria that people are worried about, meaning salmonella, given enough alcohol and enough time. And I will say that I also, just speaking for myself, not giving advice to other people, have personally drunk eggnog made in this way with raw eggs, but with lots of alcohol content. And personally, I felt fine about it.

But it also looks like some experts still have concerns that this might not always work and caution that if you want to make sure you're safe, you should cook your eggs or use a pasteurized product. I mean, this is also enough to make one rethink eating raw cookie dough and so forth.

Oh yeah. I mean, well, it's true, I guess, of anything with raw eggs in it. Like there is always some small amount of risk. Uh, you know, some small proportion of eggs out there are going to be infected. Most eggs are fine, but some are going to have salmonella in them. So you're always running that risk. And I guess, uh,

I guess some of the difficulty comes from not just whether or not you will accept the risk, but from not knowing exactly how risky it is. Like you, you can't come up, you don't have a number, you know, to say like, okay, I have this percent chance of getting salmonella if I do this. Instead, you just have a vague sense that I have some small chance and I don't know exactly what that chance is.

But in a way, that's the holiday season. It's about thinking about your chances of survival, a winter festivity that is supposed to get you through the darkest portion of the year and hopefully see about the resurrection of the living world.

that's quite beautifully put. But on the other hand, I'll just say like, you know, if, if you're not sure, yeah, just cook your eggs or just use the pasteurized thing. I mean, it's fine. Now, last year on stuff to blow your mind, we did an entire episode looking at the major award leg lamp from a Christmas story, the, uh, the 1980s holiday classic film. And, uh, you know, looking at this leg shaped lamp and finding, uh,

predecessors to this in the ancient world. In a similar way, I would like to, at the close of this episode on eggnog, consider the 1989 holiday film Christmas Vacation.

Which, of course, starred a great cast, Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid, among others. But there are at least a couple of key scenes in this movie in which the Griswold family drinks eggnog from glass goblets made in the likeness of the Wally World moose.

You can actually buy these now. This is an actual product. But in the movie, there are these little glass goblets, and they have big glass moose antlers on either side, and there's a big droopy moose snout on the front. You hold it by the ear, and you sip your eggnog that way, or you gulp it, as happens to be the case in some of the scenes.

I imagine the moose face has to be facing out or else the snout would sort of prevent you from getting it to your lips. Yeah, yeah. You'd have to hold the glass in just the right way. It's a ceremonial vessel. And I started looking around. I was thinking, I don't know. I don't know if there's going to be something in the ancient world that matches up with this. But luckily, once more, 80s holiday movie prop design is 100% in line with the manufacture of artifacts in the ancient world.

I would like to discuss the Riton. This is generally spelled R-H-Y-T-O-N, and it is a style of head cup that appears in various forms throughout the ancient world. According to Mara Abd al-Maghwad al-Qadi in Forms and Functions of Ritons in Ptolemaic Egypt,

According to this author, they were likely Persian in origin and were particularly popular during the Achaemenid dynasty of 550 through 330 BCE. You can look up images of the Raiton and the various versions of the Raiton that appear in different times and different cultures. One can roughly compare these to a drinking horn, like the hollowed horn of a beast, and

But the design and function here is a little more involved. So imagine a drinking horn in which the slender part of the horn, the tapering part of the horn, is in the likeness of an animal's head or in the front half of an animal.

And we don't have time in this episode to really dig into the variation and the different cultural takes in this episode. But again, this would have been a realistic drinking vessel. This would not be something you would bust out, I would imagine, for your just everyday consumption. This would be for ceremonial drinking. And there are essentially two types of Raitan.

In one form, you drink from the slender part of the raitan, holding it above one's head or roughly above one's head or at least parallel with one's head by either twin handles on the side or from some other kind of handle that's affixed to the object or even from sort of the horn itself.

In other forms, one drinks from the wide portion of the raiton, so the whole thing is more like a traditional goblet, except many of these designs would require, you know, some gripping by the horns or by the antlers that are on it, if there are antlers on it, and you might not be able to set it down. It might not have a bottom to it. Wow.

Wow. Well, that almost suggests a certain way to drink. Yeah. And again, this would be highly ritual. So it's not about setting your drink aside and then doing other things. You're not going to do any paperwork. This is probably part of some ritual. I don't know. You can easily imagine some sort of warrior's feast, etc. Right. You can't drink it while you're podcasting. It's maybe to drink from while people stand around you chanting drink. Right. Right.

So there are various beautiful examples of the Riton, but the one that really brought to my mind the Wally World mug is the Stag's Head Riton dating to 400 BCE. This is a silver artifact that actually made headlines just last year due to its $3.5 million appraisal value and its presence among stolen antiquities that were found in the possession of billionaire Michael Steinhardt.

You can look up articles on that, again, from just last year. The item was apparently looted from a museum in Turkey originally, but I'm unsure exactly when the looting occurred other than sometime during the 20th century during a time of unrest, which only narrows it down so much concerning the 20th century. Though it does seem to be of ancient Greek manufacture somewhere in the region of the Black Sea.

probably from the 5th century BCE. And with this one, you'd apparently drink from the stag's lower lip while holding it aloft, though not by the antlers. As is visible in many photos of this particular artifact, there's this curved handle behind the neck. Oh, I see it, yeah.

So the question remains, is the Wally World mug a Riton? Yes. No, it's not. No, it's not. Yes. First of all, it's not horn-shaped. You don't drink from the moose's lips, though that alone wouldn't disqualify it from being a Riton, as we previously noted. Right.

Though I've included a picture for you, Joe, of a Riton that would involve you drinking from the wide portion as opposed to the beast lips, you can sort of see. So this one would be very much a situation where you have this kind of like, I don't know, bronze or golden chalice, and you wouldn't be able to set it down because instead of having a flat surface, a flat bottom on the bottom of your goblet, there is like the head of a ram down there. Yeah.

So you'd have to lay it on its side, I guess, in which case you would either spill what you were drinking or you would have to have consumed it all. Once again, the medium is the message here. This is technology that by necessity shows you a way to use it. Yeah.

However, I will say the Wally World mug is the likeness of a moose head. It is the likeness of an animal's head. It also is a ceremonial drinking vessel. Clearly, the Griswolds are not drinking out of these year-round. They're busting them out for the holidays. And...

Just as some of these artifacts, such as the stag, were decorated with warrior images and images of battle, and we can imagine the ceremonies they involved probably aligned with some sort of warrior ethos, we do see Clark Griswold drinking copious amounts of Nod while working Cousin Eddie up for violence. Though, curiously, I had to go back. I was imagining this or remembering this scene incorrectly.

The scene where Clark Griswold is throwing back a whole bunch of eggnog and talking about how he wishes somebody would kidnap his boss. He's curiously not drinking from one of the moose goblets in this scene. Oh. So I don't know. I don't know what the reason for that is. You'd think you'd want him drinking out of the moose, maybe. It's just because it's harder to hold. I don't know. Maybe.

Maybe it's to show in a subtle way that Clark is actually coldly calculating in the scene. He's not as drunk as it would suggest. Yeah, that's a whole topic for another time, trying to figure out Clark Griswold. How do we feel about Clark Griswold, about his motivations and his desires in Christmas Vacation?

Clark is neutral evil. Cousin Randy Quaid, I'd say chaotic neutral. Yeah, I think so. All right. So again, not really a Riton in Christmas Vacation, but I think we might well imagine a scene from an alternate dimension in which there's a scene in Christmas Vacation in which Clark Griswold holds aloft the mighty Wally the Moose Riton.

this big glass moose head, or perhaps it's silver in this scenario, a big silver moose head. Perhaps you grip it by the antlers, and he's allowing Cousin Eddie to then drink nourishing nog from the lips of the moose before he sends him out into glorious battle against the enemies of Christmas. Bravo. All right, that's all I have. Ha ha ha!

God bless us, everyone. I will say also, I fortunately finished my eggnog before we got to the draining of abscesses. So hopefully that calibrates the podcast episode for anyone out there who's like, oh, well, Rob's having an eggnog. I should have an eggnog for this listening experience. I hope that you too were finished before the abscesses were drained.

Why are you saying that, Rob? Are you saying that otherwise it would suggest the mental image that your glass of creamy mixture is what's coming out of the abscess? Yes, that it is a goblet of holiday pus, which you might be drinking from the glass head of a moose, which doesn't help, or from the lips of a moose right on, I guess. Merry Christmas, everybody.

All right. Yeah, we're going to go and close it out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have, I mean, a lot of people out there are going to have some sort of holiday tradition involving some manner of eggnog. We didn't really have time to get into all the variations, but I know there are some. I think I've had like a Puerto Rican variation of eggnog before that was quite delightful. There's so many different regional variations, family variations. Please write in. We'd love to hear your take on all of this.

In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Mondays, we do a listener mail episode. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks to our audio producer, Max Williams. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

♪

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Botox prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Botox is not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine treatment.

Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headaches.

Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Talk to your doctor and visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. This holiday season, make sure you set aside time for self-care. Now through December 31st, shop in-store and online for participating self-care products and get four times points to use for discounts on future grocery and gas purchases. Stock up on self-care favorites like Pantene Shampoo, Gillette Fusion, and ProGlide Razors, Tampax Tampons, Aussie Base Hairspray, and Pampers Swaddlers Diapers. Offer ends December 31st.

Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit Safeway.com for more details.