Eggnog
White of 1. Egg Beaten Stiff Yolk of 1 Egg 1 Tablespoon Yellow Corn Syrup 1 Cup Rich Milk 1 Tablespoon Sherry, Brandy, or Whiskey Mix in the order given, beating all the time. Dust the top with grated nutmeg and serve very cold.
A single-glass eggnog built on raw egg and served cold, with no cooking step at any point. The ingredients are otherwise unremarkable; the method is the problem.
- Raw egg, never heatedBoth the white and the yolk go into the glass uncooked and the drink is served cold, so nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. A tablespoon of sherry or whiskey in a cup of milk is nowhere near enough alcohol to make any difference to that; the dilution is far below the level sometimes credited with reducing pathogens in long-aged nogs. Anyone wanting eggnog today should use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurised shell eggs.
- Who it was written forBeaten raw egg in milk was standard invalid and convalescent cookery, meaning it was routinely given to exactly the people — the sick, the elderly, small children — who are least able to tolerate a foodborne infection.
- "Rich milk"In a book of this vintage this most likely means milk that has not been skimmed, or milk with some of the top cream stirred back in; whole milk with a splash of half-and-half is a reasonable modern stand-in. Depending on when and where the book was published, the milk may also have been unpasteurised, which would compound the risk above.
- Yellow corn syrupNot today's clear light corn syrup and not high-fructose corn syrup. A "yellow" or golden syrup would be closer in flavour to a mild dark corn syrup or golden syrup, and corn syrup was promoted heavily as a cheap sweetener in the 1910s and 1920s.
- YieldOne cup of milk and one egg makes a single tall glass, not a punchbowl.
Eggnog is generally held to descend from the British posset and sack-posset — hot milk curdled with wine or ale and enriched with eggs — which crossed the Atlantic and settled into a colder, spirit-based drink in America, where rum, whiskey and brandy were cheaper than imported sack. The name is generally traced to "nog," an old English word for strong ale, though the derivation is traditional rather than proven. What marks this version as twentieth-century and American is the corn syrup: a household book of the period reaches for a bottled commercial sweetener rather than sugar or the older sugared-and-aged approach, and offers sherry, brandy or whiskey interchangeably, in a single tablespoon, as flavouring rather than as the point of the drink. That restraint says a good deal about the era's view of eggnog as a nourishing food — one glass, one egg, dusted with nutmeg — rather than a holiday indulgence.