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Egg Nogg
Put into a large tumbler a table-spoonful of icing sugar and one egg. When well beaten together add a table-spoonful of boiling water, and a wine-glassful each of brandy and Jamaica rum. Fill up the tumbler with boiling milk, and mix well. Dust with nutmeg. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A single-serving hot egg nog of the posset school, mixed straight in the glass. It works, but only if the hot liquid goes in slowly.
- The hinge: temper, don't dumpBeat the egg and sugar until pale, add the tablespoon of boiling water first while whisking hard, then pour the boiling milk in a thin stream, stirring the whole time. Tipping hot milk in all at once gives you sweet scrambled egg in a tumbler.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian recipe books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml). Two of them means roughly 4 fl oz of spirits in one drink, which is three to four modern measures. Halving the spirits gives a drink most people can finish.
- Icing sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. It presumably suits here because it dissolves quickly in a cold beaten egg; granulated may still feel gritty when the milk goes in.
- Jamaica rumMeant here as dark, heavy, pot-still rum, prized in Britain for its pungency. A modern dark Jamaican rum is the direct descendant; a light white rum will taste thin against the brandy.
- The tumblerA tumbler of the period was commonly reckoned at roughly half a pint, though sizes varied. Use a heatproof glass or a mug, and warm it first, or the boiling milk will drop in temperature at once and may crack thin glass.
- Egg safetyThe boiling milk will not reliably bring this to a safe temperature: it is diluted by a beaten egg and some 4 fl oz of cold spirits, so the finished drink is likely to sit below 70C. Treat it as a raw-egg drink and use pasteurised eggs, particularly for anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the top after mixing. Pre-ground nutmeg stirred in disappears; the point is the aroma at the rim.
- Yield and costOne large drink. The 1s. 3d. is the estimated cost at the time of publication, driven almost entirely by the brandy and rum.
Egg nog belongs to the long family of hot spiced egg-and-milk drinks that runs back through the English posset and sack posset, in which hot milk was curdled with wine or ale and thickened with eggs. The name itself is usually traced to nog, an East Anglian word for a strong ale, though the derivation from noggin, a small drinking vessel, is also commonly offered; both are traditional explanations rather than settled fact. The drink was firmly established in America by the early nineteenth century, where rum, and later bourbon, replaced the older wine, and it travelled back across the Atlantic as an American curiosity.