Eggnog
To each egg one tablespoonful of sugar, one wine-glassful of milk, one wine glassful of liquor. The sugar and yolks to be well beaten together and the whites (well beaten) added by degrees. To twelve eggs put eight glassfuls of brandy and four of wine. Put the liquor in the yolks and sugar, stirring slowly all the time; then add the white and lastly the milk.--Mrs. F. Eggnog Three dozen eggs three pounds of sugar half a gallon of brandy half a pint of french brandy half a gallon of milk. Beat the yolks and whites separately. Stir the sugar thoroughly into the yolks add the brandy slowly so as to cook the eggs, then add the milk and lastly the whites, with grated nutmeg reserving enough for top dressing.--Mrs. P. W.
Eggnog.
Take any number of eggs you wish beat the whites and yolks separately and as light as possible. Stir into the yolks while beating a tablespoonful of sugar to each egg. Then pour on the yolks and sugar a small wine glassful of wine flavored with a little vanilla to each egg. On that pour a wine glassful of rich milk or cream to each egg. Beat the whites as if for cake then beat in enough sugar to make them smooth and stiff. Stir this into the eggnog for twenty minutes and grate nutmeg on the top.--Mrs. R. C.
Three versions from three contributors, all built on the same frame: raw beaten eggs, sugar, spirits and milk. The reason this page carries a caution is in the second recipe's own words.
- The eggs are never cookedMrs. P. W. instructs the cook to add the brandy slowly "so as to cook the eggs." Alcohol at this concentration denatures a little surface protein and nothing more; it does not pasteurize. Shell eggs beaten raw into a cold drink carry a Salmonella risk that no amount of stirring removes.
- The dilution works against youEven the strongest of these mixtures ends up well under 20 percent alcohol by volume once milk and beaten whites go in, and it is served immediately rather than aged. Aged, high-proof eggnogs are a separate case; none of these three is that.
- Mrs. R. C.'s version is the weakest of allIt uses wine only — a small wine glassful, so under two ounces of table wine per egg — and its alcohol content is correspondingly low. Any antimicrobial effect is negligible, and it is the least defensible of the three.
- Raw milk and cream"Rich milk or cream" in an 1870s Virginia kitchen meant unpasteurized dairy, a second uncontrolled variable stacked on the first.
- The alcohol load is not trivial eitherMrs. P. W.'s bowl takes half a gallon of brandy plus half a pint more against three dozen eggs — close to two ounces of spirit per serving before anyone refills a cup. This was a punch bowl for a room full of visitors, not a drink to be measured out by the glass.
- Reading the measuresA wine-glassful in these books is about two fluid ounces, not the 6 to 8 ounces a modern wine glass holds. Anyone converting these ratios literally with modern glassware ends up with something far stronger and thinner than intended.
- If you want eggnogUse a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base held to a verified temperature.
Eggnog descends from the British posset and sack-possets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — hot milk curdled with wine or ale, sweetened and spiced — and the "nog" of the name is generally traced to a term for strong ale, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. In Virginia the drink became firmly attached to Christmas and New Year visiting, and brandy or wine stood in for the imported rum of the northern colonies. That three separate contributors to Housekeeping in Old Virginia sent in their own proportions says a good deal about how the drink functioned: not a fixed formula but a household signature. The instruction to beat the whites "as if for cake" and fold them in over twenty minutes reflects a period taste for eggnog as something closer to a spoonable froth than a pourable drink.