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Frozen Egg-Nog
This is a decoction fit for a feast. ¼ ounce granulated gelatin, 8 eggs, 1 quart Boil the milk, 1 stick of cinnamon, 1 pound sugar, 1 quart water, ½ pint eggs, I sugar, i quart water, ½ pint brandy. Boil the milk with the stick of cinnamon. Dissolve the gelatin in the hot milk. Beat the yolks of the eggs and add the milk slowly, constantly stirring, then add the water and sugar in the same way, stirring until dissolved. Add the brandy and the whites of the eggs well beaten. When cold freeze hard. Serve in a sherbet glass with a spoonful of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.
A fountain-era frozen egg-nog, and one of the more mangled ingredient lists in the book — the quantities appear to have been set twice and partly garbled in type. Two separate problems make it unsuitable as written: the eggs are never cooked, and the printed measurements cannot be reconstructed with confidence.
- The eggs never reach a safe temperatureThe yolks are only tempered with hot milk off the boil, which does not reliably bring them through the range where Salmonella is killed, and the beaten whites are folded in raw and never heated at all. Freezing does not destroy pathogens; it preserves them. A current recipe using a properly cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs should be used instead.
- The brandy is not a safeguardAgainst a quart of milk and a quart of water, a pint and a half of brandy works out at roughly a tenth of the finished mixture by volume, below the concentrations at which alcohol has been shown to reduce pathogens in eggnog, and in any case it is not a substitute for cooking the eggs.
- The ingredient list is corrupt"8 eggs, I quart Boil the milk" and "½ pint eggs, I sugar, i quart water" are printer's duplications; the milk quantity, the second sugar quantity and the true egg count cannot be recovered from the page. Anyone attempting to reconstruct it would be guessing, not following a recipe.
- Gelatin as a stabiliserA quarter ounce of granulated gelatin is about one modern envelope. Soda-fountain frozen desserts used gelatin to hold body in mixtures churned in hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezers, where overrun and texture were unpredictable. Modern recipes more often rely on a custard base and faster freezing, though commercial ice creams still use stabilisers of their own.
- "Freeze hard" was a real difficultyWith this much brandy the mixture would barely set in a salt-and-ice freezer, and in a domestic freezer it would remain slushy.
- The service, at least, is clearA sherbet glass, a spoonful of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry is a familiar fountain presentation for a frozen drink sold as a dessert rather than a beverage.
Egg-nog reached American soda fountains by a roundabout route: it began as a spirituous winter drink — the name is generally traced to "noggin," a small wooden cup, or to "egg and grog" — and by the late nineteenth century had become so firmly associated with holidays and hospitality that dispensers wanted a version they could sell across the counter. Fountain manuals of this period are full of such translations, taking a bar drink or a household punch and reworking it as something scooped, stirred or frozen, often with gelatin or cornstarch added for body. The cinnamon stick boiled in the milk and the maraschino cherry on top mark the two ends of the dish's life: the older spiced posset tradition, and the standardised, garnished fountain product that replaced it.