Eggnog
Stir half a cup of sugar (white), yolks of six eggs well beaten, into one quart of rich cream; add half a pint of brandy, flavor with nutmeg, and lastly add whites of the eggs well whipped.-M. H.
This is a raw-egg eggnog: nothing in it is ever heated, and the alcohol present is not enough to make the eggs safe. The notes below explain the terms and the specific problem.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenSix raw yolks and six raw whites are folded into cream and served immediately, with no cooking step at any point. Salmonella can be present inside intact, clean-looking shell eggs, and neither whipping nor sugar does anything to it.
- The brandy does not sterilise itHalf a pint of brandy in roughly five cups of cream, sugar and egg works out to somewhere around 5-6 percent alcohol by volume in the finished nog. Studies of aged eggnog rely on far higher alcohol levels held for weeks under refrigeration; a drink mixed and poured the same evening gets no such protection.
- Who is most at riskSmall children, pregnant women, adults over 65 and anyone immunocompromised should not be given raw-egg drinks at all. A modern recipe using a cooked custard base or pasteurised shell eggs should be used instead.
- Gill, pint and quartA half pint here is one US cup of brandy; the quart of cream is four cups. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks in this tradition use the US pint of 16 fl oz, not the imperial pint.
- "Rich cream"In period household use this means undiluted cream skimmed from the top of the milk. Its fat content varied with the milk and the skimming, but it was broadly in the range of what is sold today as heavy or whipping cream. Some period cooks cut cream with milk; this recipe does not.
- White sugarRefined white sugar cost more than brown in this period, so the specification may mark the drink as something better than everyday cooking.
- YieldAbout six cups before the whites are folded in, and more once they are. Somewhere around eight to twelve small cups, which is the scale these recipes assume: a punch bowl, not a glass.
Eggnog descends from British posset and sack-posset, hot spiced milk curdled with wine or ale, which crossed the Atlantic and shed its heat while picking up local spirits: rum in New England, brandy and whiskey in the South. The recipe is printed under the initials "M. H.", and its brandy-and-heavy-cream version is the recognisably Southern form. The drink was tied firmly to Christmas and New Year calling, when a bowl stood ready for visitors through the day, which is also why the proportions run to a quart of cream rather than a serving or two. The separate beating of yolks and whites, with the whipped whites folded in last, is the older method and gives the foam that plain shaken eggnog lacks.