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Montauk Egg-Nogg
Place in a large glass a fresh egg, half tablespoon sugar, a little nutmeg, wineglass brandy and quarter pony Jamaica rum. Fill the glass with milk, shake well, strain into a large glass, twist a piece of lemon over and serve.
A single-serving spirit nog of the sort a hotel bar would build to order. The measures are bar measures rather than kitchen ones, and the egg goes in raw and stays raw.
- Why this one failsThe whole egg is never heated at any point — it is shaken cold with spirits and milk and drunk immediately. Raw shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella, and the roughly 2 oz of spirit here does nothing to sterilise them; alcohol at that dilution is not a pasteurising agent. A current recipe should be used instead.
- WineglassIn American bar usage of this period a wineglass is 2 fluid ounces, not the capacity of a modern stemmed glass. Recipes of the era that call for a wineglass of brandy mean a double, not a tumblerful.
- PonyA pony is 1 fluid ounce, so a quarter pony is a quarter ounce — a teaspoon and a half. The rum is a flavouring here, not a second base spirit.
- Jamaica rumMeant the dark, high-ester pot-still rum of the Jamaican trade, chosen for exactly that funky intensity. Any modern light or column-still rum is a different ingredient and would be lost in the milk.
- Two glassesThe instruction to shake in a large glass and strain into a large glass is consistent with the glass-and-tin shake of the period bar. No ice is called for, so the straining is not for ice; the recipe does not say what it is meant to catch.
- YieldOne drink, and a substantial one. The recipe does not give the glass size, so the finished volume can only be guessed at — perhaps 8 to 10 ounces once the milk fills the glass.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) includes a run of named nogs and flips of the kind a Delmonico's-trained man would have known from the hotel and club bars of the era, and this one borrows the name of Montauk, at the far eastern tip of Long Island — a summer destination for New York society by the 1890s. Attaching a resort or a railway terminus to a mixed drink was common practice in period bar books, and the name usually signals nothing about the ingredients beyond the fashion of the moment. The drink itself belongs to the older egg-and-spirit family — flips, possets and nogs — which long predates the bar: whole eggs beaten into wine, ale or spirits were a domestic restorative in Britain and colonial America, and the milk-and-brandy version became an American Christmas standard.