Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. We're mostly off this week for the holidays,
Speaker 1: so we have a vault episode for you today. This
Speaker 1: is going to be one from a few years back.
Speaker 1: This is this one originally published twelve fifteen, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: It is our episode on the invention of eggnock. So
Speaker 1: let's drink up.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 3: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. It's that time
Speaker 3: of year again. And by that time, I mean it
Speaker 3: is the holidays. We're knee deep, perhaps waist deep in
Speaker 3: the holidays, and there's no going back. We might as
Speaker 3: well just push forward at this point, like it's just
Speaker 3: as much just as much effort to keep going as
Speaker 3: it would be to turn back. So once more, we
Speaker 3: have a holiday episode for you. It's actually going to
Speaker 3: be our third installment in our Holiday Invention series, where
Speaker 3: we more or less give the invention treatment to various
Speaker 3: holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year we're going to
Speaker 3: be looking in earnest at eggnog.
Speaker 4: Is eggnog an invention. Sure, we can stretch the definition.
Speaker 4: I think that's okay.
Speaker 3: I think so. I mean, we did an invention, a
Speaker 3: full blown invention episode about the Matai, which we you know,
Speaker 3: we had Jeff Beach bombarry on as a guest to
Speaker 3: talk about that. Eggnog is not something that occurs naturally
Speaker 3: in the world. It must be made at some point.
Speaker 3: There had to be a first or something like a first,
Speaker 3: and you know, we'll get into that. And it's one
Speaker 3: of those things that has a number of different customs
Speaker 3: and cultural details surrounding it. Now, Joe, I'm not sure
Speaker 3: what your relationship with egnog happens to be, because I
Speaker 3: don't know that we've ever really spoken about this. I
Speaker 3: don't think we've had eggnog together before, not that I recall,
Speaker 3: but my family's general approach is will generally buy a
Speaker 3: carton of almond nog each year, largely for our son
Speaker 3: because he gets super into it. And if I have
Speaker 3: a chance to visit a like an upscale cocktail place
Speaker 3: or a nice restaurant, then I will jump at the
Speaker 3: opportunity to order an eggnog if they have one on
Speaker 3: the menu. In the past I've made it down to
Speaker 3: New Orleans for the start of beach Bumberry Sippings Santa
Speaker 3: festivities at beach Bumberr's Latit Tude twenty nine. They also
Speaker 3: have pop ups all over the place, and they'll generally
Speaker 3: have at least one holiday teaki beverage on there that
Speaker 3: is at least eggnog esque.
Speaker 4: In form I'm picturing piles of crushed or pellet ice
Speaker 4: with kind of a frothy, creamy gryme about them and
Speaker 4: some nutmeg sprinkled over top.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the nutmeg is will discuss is pretty essential.
Speaker 3: So I did make it down there this year, but
Speaker 3: I did make it over to a tiki bar in
Speaker 3: our area, Decatur's sos t Bar, and I enjoyed a
Speaker 3: frozen take on a classic eggnog. Generally a rich drink
Speaker 3: though so once twice three times per year, Max. That's
Speaker 3: generally enough from me, uh huh. Now. Before we came
Speaker 3: in here, though, I mentioned to my wife that I
Speaker 3: was about to record the eggnog episode, and she was
Speaker 3: kind enough to provide me with an entire glass of
Speaker 3: eggnog here for me to consume during this episode. The
Speaker 3: listeners at home, you'll have to take my word for it, Joe,
Speaker 3: I think you can see it on the video feed here.
Speaker 4: Wait, is this full booze eggnog?
Speaker 3: Or well you might well presume that, but I couldn't
Speaker 3: possibly comment, Yes, creamy, rich, hint of nutmeg, beautiful.
Speaker 4: I have no eggnog in the house. A cute cute
Speaker 4: Joe Peshi and Home Alone saying eggnog, eggnog dressed as
Speaker 4: a cop like eggnog is the most disgusting substance on Earth.
Speaker 4: And you know what, as a child, that was pretty
Speaker 4: much where my head was at. I was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: Joe peshe in Home Alone is correct. I found the
Speaker 4: idea revolting, not just revolting, I think, I think I
Speaker 4: probably found it borderline nauseating to think of a drink
Speaker 4: made out of eggs. Something changed over the years. Now
Speaker 4: I find it quite delightful.
Speaker 3: So was the eggs that threw you off?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well you're gonna drink eggs?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: So I think about eggs. There's something that you know,
Speaker 4: I liked eggs scrambled like they make them at the
Speaker 4: cracker barrel. You know, I'm thinking of like a thick
Speaker 4: yellow curd like substance, and always in savory context. I mean,
Speaker 4: I know, obviously now that eggs are used in all
Speaker 4: kinds of baking and sweet contexts, but that's not how
Speaker 4: I thought about them when I was a kid. So
Speaker 4: the idea of drinking a sweet egg based beverage was
Speaker 4: absolutely vile to my brain.
Speaker 3: I can understand that. I mean, especially even the name
Speaker 3: is a bit potentially off putting. It's very forward with
Speaker 3: the egg. What you were about to drink contains eggs,
Speaker 3: and then the nog also can throw one for a curve.
Speaker 3: I do like some of the archaic spellings of eggnog
Speaker 3: that I've encountered researching this episode. Oftentimes the way we
Speaker 3: encounter it now it's egg n og, but some of
Speaker 3: these other spellings will be egg n ogg. I like
Speaker 3: the double the double g's occurring in both parts of
Speaker 3: the word.
Speaker 4: That's just symmetry. That's good branding.
Speaker 3: Yes, Now, before we proceed, I guess we should go
Speaker 3: ahead and drive home exactly what eggnog is. We've alluded
Speaker 3: to it a little bit already, but technically it's a
Speaker 3: milk egg drink or a milk egg punch. And we've
Speaker 3: of course reached the points as a civilization where you
Speaker 3: can have something that is identifiable as a nog without
Speaker 3: the presence of egg or dairy. But historically this is
Speaker 3: the realm from which this beverage arises.
Speaker 4: Right, So you're you mentioned almond nog. I guess that
Speaker 4: is equivalent in the same way that you might have
Speaker 4: almond milk. It is a substitute for milk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, though, I guess it's even more like some people
Speaker 3: get up in arms, especially the dairy industry. I know
Speaker 3: about things that are not milk calling themselves milk. And
Speaker 3: even more to the point, I guess something like a
Speaker 3: soy nog or an almond nog is going to have
Speaker 3: neither eggs nor dairy, and so it is even further removed.
Speaker 3: But yet it's still very much in the spirit of
Speaker 3: of of the classic nog. So I think it more
Speaker 3: than qualifies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, nog is a thick, creamy, sweet drink.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a state of mind. It's it's it's a
Speaker 3: holiday tradition. Now, one of the sources I'm going to
Speaker 3: refer back to several times in this episode is the
Speaker 3: excellent book Imbibe exclamation Point by David Wandriche, which is
Speaker 3: a text that we've referenced in the show in the past.
Speaker 3: It is one of, if not the best books you
Speaker 3: can pick up on the history of the American cocktail.
Speaker 3: This is a great book. It cites, among many others,
Speaker 3: the legendary professor Jerry Thomas, who lived eighteen thirty through
Speaker 3: eighteen eighty five, the New Orleans bartender who wrote the
Speaker 3: Seminole Bartender's Guide and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general.
Speaker 3: Were go into more depth on this in an older
Speaker 3: episode or episodes that we did together on Mixology.
Speaker 4: I think we ended up talking about absentth a lot
Speaker 4: in those.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would make sense, And I know Jerry Thomas
Speaker 3: also comes up in the recent episode on ice the
Speaker 3: interview that I did. But according to Wondrich, basic milk
Speaker 3: punches go back to the late sixteen hundreds, and to
Speaker 3: give you an example of what a milk punch consists of.
Speaker 3: And again this is not an egg milk punch, This
Speaker 3: is just a milk punch Wondriche includes a recipe from
Speaker 3: Jerry Thomas. Jerry Thomas would have you know, brought up
Speaker 3: together a bunch of these different recipes for drinks and
Speaker 3: put them in his own book at the time. This
Speaker 3: particular recipe from Jerry Thomas calls for sugar water, brandy, rum,
Speaker 3: and shaved ice. A little nutmeg goes on top, and
Speaker 3: Wandritch includes a quote from this is an eighteen seventy
Speaker 3: three quote from the Brooklyn Eagle that states that this
Speaker 3: punch was quote the surest thing in the world to
Speaker 3: get drunk on, and so fearfully drunk that you won't
Speaker 3: know whether you are a cow, yourself or some other
Speaker 3: foolish thing.
Speaker 4: Hmmm, that's that's good. No. One thing I have to
Speaker 4: point out is that when you listed the ingredients, you
Speaker 4: did not list milk. So I assume these are the
Speaker 4: things that are added to the milk.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, okay, yeah. The milk would would also be
Speaker 3: be an important part of this. So already we're kind
Speaker 3: of in the territory of what we think of when
Speaker 3: we think about eggnog, but of course there are no
Speaker 3: eggs there now. When it comes to eggnog itself, Thomas
Speaker 3: was very much of the opinion that eggnog was quote
Speaker 3: a beverage of American origin, and Wondrich states that quote
Speaker 3: the drink's earliest mentions come from a seventeen eighty eight
Speaker 3: Philadelphia newspaper, and all the other mentions are American and
Speaker 3: if early European travelers to the United States viewed it
Speaker 3: as one of the novelties Americans were inflicting on the
Speaker 3: art of drinking. By the eighteen sixties, it was a
Speaker 3: drink of comfortable middle age with a wide, if strictly
Speaker 3: seasonal popularity. When Thomas added that in the North quote
Speaker 3: it is a favorite of all seasons, he was certainly
Speaker 3: overstating the case.
Speaker 4: So you bring up that mention in the seventeen eighty
Speaker 4: eight newspaper, and this name drop of eggnog as a
Speaker 4: recipe is also referenced in a great source I found
Speaker 4: that was aimed at unearthing the etymological history of eggnog,
Speaker 4: because it's obvious why the word egg is in the name.
Speaker 4: There are eggs in it, but what exactly is anog? Could,
Speaker 4: as the Simpsons proposed, you equally whip up a cauldron
Speaker 4: of corn nog.
Speaker 3: Cornnog sounds a delicious like it brings to mind like
Speaker 3: corn puddings.
Speaker 4: I think it occurs in the Simpsons episode with the hurricane,
Speaker 4: when the stores are there's a run on the quickie
Speaker 4: mart and the only things left on the shelves are
Speaker 4: corn nog and wadded beef. But anyway, diving into the
Speaker 4: history and etymology of eggnog or corn nog whatever, what
Speaker 4: have you? Any nogs? My source here is a December
Speaker 4: two thousand and nine article called the Origins of Eggnog
Speaker 4: Holiday Grog by the American linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer,
Speaker 4: who is brother of the excellent science writer Karl Zimmer,
Speaker 4: who's been a guest on the show.
Speaker 3: Before Huh Crazy.
Speaker 4: So here's what Ben Zimmer says about nog. The word
Speaker 4: nog first shows up as a regional term in England,
Speaker 4: specifically in the region of East Anglia, so it's the
Speaker 4: eastern part of the country containing Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire,
Speaker 4: and it referred that term there referred to a type
Speaker 4: of beer. We know this because of a letter written
Speaker 4: from the County of Norfolk in the year sixteen ninety
Speaker 4: three by a man named Humphrey Prideaux, who described quote
Speaker 4: a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country
Speaker 4: they call nog. So nog is high gravity beer. It's
Speaker 4: strong stuff. But to take one step back, why would
Speaker 4: the East Anglians call strong beer nog. Zimmer identifies a
Speaker 4: couple of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from
Speaker 4: the word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated
Speaker 4: slang for head for your head. But before that nogin
Speaker 4: meant a small mug or a small drink of spirits.
Speaker 4: So perhaps noggin was shorter, was shortened to nog, and
Speaker 4: it came to refer to the beer inside the mug
Speaker 4: instead of the mug itself. And we do that kind
Speaker 4: of metonymy with words today like did you have one? Oh,
Speaker 4: I drank two glasses. You're not saying you literally drank
Speaker 4: the glass. The glasses mean the wine inside the glass, right.
Speaker 4: But another idea is that the word nog for strong
Speaker 4: beer comes from a Scottish word nug or nuged ale,
Speaker 4: which means ale that you heat up by sticking a
Speaker 4: hot poker in it, which is funny enough to imagine
Speaker 4: in itself, but I can also see how that would
Speaker 4: correspond to a drink with strong alcohol alcohol content, because
Speaker 4: drinks with higher alcohol content are often said to taste
Speaker 4: warm or even to burn.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, yeah, this is this is interesting. It brings to
Speaker 3: mind you the images of some of these older drinks
Speaker 3: where you'd you would you would stick the hot poker
Speaker 3: or some sort of hot metal into it. I think
Speaker 3: there's a scene in the excellent TV series The Nick
Speaker 3: where you see some of the characters getting a drink
Speaker 3: of this fashion.
Speaker 4: M Okay, So so far, we've got the idea that
Speaker 4: you start with either a little mug called a noggin
Speaker 4: or a type of beer warmed with a hot poker
Speaker 4: called a nug And somehow one of these terms gets
Speaker 4: poured it over into this East Anglian word nog, which
Speaker 4: means strong beer. But how does that actually get connected
Speaker 4: to the sweet, milky, eggy drink we are familiar with.
Speaker 4: We don't know for sure, but the link in the
Speaker 4: chain seems to be alcohol. Because while you can buy
Speaker 4: kid friendly nog in the dairy issle these days, everything
Speaker 4: I've been reading suggests that early eggnog was boozy. That
Speaker 4: was a primary characteristic of what the noog was. It
Speaker 4: had a lot of alcohol in it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, that's exactly what I saw in all of
Speaker 3: my research. Nobody's talking about eggnog is something that is
Speaker 3: then spiked. It is inherently spiked.
Speaker 4: And Zimmer reports that a Maryland clergyman named Jonathan Bouchet
Speaker 4: is alleged to have written the first known reference to
Speaker 4: eggnog and a poem in seventeen seventy five, but this
Speaker 4: poem was not published until about thirty years later, so
Speaker 4: we don't know when it was actually written for sure.
Speaker 4: But the relevant section of the poem goes like this,
Speaker 4: fog DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. This
Speaker 4: is nog with two g's at night hot suppings and
Speaker 4: at mid day grog my palate can regale. So you
Speaker 4: see the context here is fully alcoholic grog refers to
Speaker 4: a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Then there's that line, fog
Speaker 4: DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. A dram
Speaker 4: usually refers to a small drink of whiskey, and according
Speaker 4: to Miriam Webster, fog DRAMs are quote DRAMs resorted to
Speaker 4: on the pretense of their protecting from the danger of fog.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, boss, I had to have another whiskey before
Speaker 4: work or the fog could have killed me on the
Speaker 4: way here.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, yeah, this is making sense. Is an
Speaker 3: early morning drink though, because you get your your fog
Speaker 3: protection you get a couple of eggs in there, maybe
Speaker 3: you know this is a breakfast that you're drinking down exactly.
Speaker 4: So Bouchet may have written that in seventy seventy five.
Speaker 4: It's hard to say for sure, but according to Zimmer,
Speaker 4: the earliest at rock solid references to eggnog where we
Speaker 4: know the date of their publication, appear in a handful
Speaker 4: of newspapers in the year seventeen eighty eight, as you
Speaker 4: mentioned earlier. Now one is a March seventeen eighty eight
Speaker 4: report in the New Jersey Journal, which and I love
Speaker 4: that this is what some newspaper articles consisted of at
Speaker 4: the time. It says, a young man with a cormorant
Speaker 4: appetite meaning like gluttonous, A young man with a cormorant
Speaker 4: appetite voraciously devoured last week at Connecticut Farms thirty raw eggs,
Speaker 4: a glass of eggnog, and another of brandy sling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is this what newspapers were back in the day.
Speaker 3: Did you have like a gluttony page where you're like,
Speaker 3: what's everybody overeating in New Jersey?
Speaker 4: Stop the presses. We've got to get this story, this
Speaker 4: hot story about the guy who ate thirty eggs in there. Okay,
Speaker 4: so whatever eggnog is at the time, he had some
Speaker 4: Another article is from October seventeen eighty eight in the
Speaker 4: Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia, where a writer was complaining about
Speaker 4: an upset stomach and wrote, quote, when wine and beer,
Speaker 4: punch and eggnog meat instantly ensues.
Speaker 3: A quarrel, there's wisdom to that. I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've only ever heard the liquor before beer kind
Speaker 4: of thing. I've never heard it taken out to four
Speaker 4: different things with like punch and eggnog in there.
Speaker 3: You know, we were looking back at a time when
Speaker 3: drinking was a little more robust throughout the country. I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I love the fact that newspapers
Speaker 4: not only used to report on what some guy aded
Speaker 4: a form, but also what gave me an upset tummy.
Speaker 4: So it sounds like an alcohol beverage known as eggnog
Speaker 4: was in common parlance in the colonies and the young
Speaker 4: United States in the late eighteenth century. But Zimmer also
Speaker 4: documents how an early example of eggnog was associated with
Speaker 4: Christmas celebration by citing a piece in the Virginia Chronicle
Speaker 4: from January seventeen ninety three, which reads as follows. On
Speaker 4: last Christmas Eve, several gentlemen met at Northampton Courthouse and
Speaker 4: spent the evening in mirth and festivity when eggnog was
Speaker 4: the principal liquor used by the company. After they had
Speaker 4: indulged pretty freely in this beverage, a gentleman in the
Speaker 4: company offered a bet that not one of the party
Speaker 4: could write four verses extempore, which should be rhyme and sence. Okay,
Speaker 4: He's like, we're so drunk, I bet none of you
Speaker 4: can write four lines of poetry that will make sense
Speaker 4: and rhyme. So what did they come up with? While
Speaker 4: one guy belts out the following, 'tis eggnog, whose golden
Speaker 4: streams dispense far richer treasures to the Ravish sense, the
Speaker 4: muse from wine derives a transient glare, but Eggnog's drafts
Speaker 4: afford her solid fare. So move over, wine. The muses
Speaker 4: are no longer interested in you now they will only
Speaker 4: be singing to people who are chug and agnog.
Speaker 3: Eggnog doesn't seem to have a personification, though, like there's
Speaker 3: no like satyr of eggnog.
Speaker 4: Right the Dionysus of eggnog.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I suppose it's you know, he was before its time.
Speaker 3: I think he would have approved of egnog, especially based
Speaker 3: on these historical references to agnog.
Speaker 4: So do we know exactly what they were putting in
Speaker 4: eggnog at the time. Well, there's a book from seventeen
Speaker 4: ninety nine called Travels through the States of North America
Speaker 4: and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the
Speaker 4: years seventy ninety five, ninety six and ninety seven by
Speaker 4: an Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld, And this
Speaker 4: passage actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing
Speaker 4: I think David Wondrich who said that sometimes people from
Speaker 4: Europe might encounter eggnog and think, oh, you know, what
Speaker 4: crimes they're committing against drinking culture here in the Americas.
Speaker 4: And I wonder if there's a little bit of that
Speaker 4: kind of raised eyebrow going on in this passage. But
Speaker 4: we'll see what you think. So Weld is writing about
Speaker 4: a stop at an inn near Baltimore, Maryland, where he writes, quote,
Speaker 4: several travelers had stopped at the same house that I
Speaker 4: did the first night I was on the road, and
Speaker 4: we all breakfasted together preparatory to setting out the next morning.
Speaker 4: The American travelers, before they pursued their journey, took a
Speaker 4: hearty draft each. According to custom of eggnog, a mixture
Speaker 4: composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar beat up together.
Speaker 4: So eggnog it should be heavy, sweet, exploding with alcohol,
Speaker 4: drunk in large quantities in the morning before setting out
Speaker 4: on a long journey.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is I mean it really it forces you
Speaker 3: to rethink egnog because I think a lot of people
Speaker 3: are probably like like me, You grew up exposed to again,
Speaker 3: the grocery store eggnog, and there's this kind of sense
Speaker 3: that eggnog is this drink for everybody. Eggnog's this drink
Speaker 3: for kids. And as you get older, then you're perhaps
Speaker 3: in a situation where you can have the eggnog with
Speaker 3: something added to it, eggnog plus you know, if you like.
Speaker 3: But this is but the historical truth of eggnog is no,
Speaker 3: this is the thing that the really drunken adults are
Speaker 3: having sometimes first thing in the morning.
Speaker 4: Also regarding famous eggnog recipes from the early days of
Speaker 4: the United States, there is a famous recipe for eggnog
Speaker 4: that is alleged to come from George Washington's kitchen papers.
Speaker 4: You'll find this if you google George Washington's egnog. I've
Speaker 4: seen some serious day out cast upon its origins, like
Speaker 4: whether it was actually Washington's. But according to the Farmer's Almanac,
Speaker 4: this famous recipe goes as follows. It's one quart cream,
Speaker 4: one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy,
Speaker 4: half a pint rye whiskey, half a pint Jamaica rum,
Speaker 4: and a quarter pint sherry. And then you mix the liquor,
Speaker 4: separate the yolks in the whites of twelve eggs, add
Speaker 4: sugar to the beaten yolks. Mix well. Then you add
Speaker 4: milk and cream, slowly beating, beat the whites of the
Speaker 4: eggs until stiff peaks form, then fold slowly into the mixture.
Speaker 4: Then you let it sit in a cool place for
Speaker 4: several days. Then quote taste frequently. And I could be wrong,
Speaker 4: but I believe this is the recipe that our colleague,
Speaker 4: our colleague Alex Williams uses when he makes his famous
Speaker 4: eggnog for all of our coworkers.
Speaker 3: Yes, it definitely is This is definitely the recipe he
Speaker 3: would use, and it is quite lightful. But yeah, I
Speaker 3: encountered the same thing. Looking at the actual history of this,
Speaker 3: there's some doubt as to whether George Washington actually serve this.
Speaker 3: And then there are some accounts that say, well, it
Speaker 3: looks like maybe there's evidence that eggnog was served at
Speaker 3: Mount Vernon, But as far as the precise recipe, I
Speaker 3: don't know that there's a lot of data to back
Speaker 3: that up. Yeah, though we will have we will touch
Speaker 3: on at least one former US president who did have
Speaker 3: a recipe for egnog and did serve it and drink it.
Speaker 3: All right, all this being said, before we proceed with eggnog,
Speaker 3: I think we can at least consider the possibility of
Speaker 3: predecessors that, Yes, even if egnog is something that emerges
Speaker 3: in North America, there are at least things not unlike
Speaker 3: egnog that one can encounter, say in at least late
Speaker 3: medieval and post medieval Europe.
Speaker 4: Oh, yes, some gorgeous textures to imagine.
Speaker 3: Yes, let's go back to the late Middle Ages and
Speaker 3: drink some hard milk. So European holiday traditions, which of
Speaker 3: course inform holiday traditions and Colonial America and beyond are
Speaker 3: a mix of Christian traditions, more ancient traditions, and a
Speaker 3: great deal of regional variability. I was, in fact just
Speaker 3: researching the Hooden or Hoden Horse of Kent for the
Speaker 3: Monster Facts series, and I think that's a great example
Speaker 3: of this. It brings to mind various costume street wandering
Speaker 3: traditions as well as caroling and was sailing. Wassaile, of course,
Speaker 3: is a door to door ritualistic and communal hot drink
Speaker 3: that typically contained mulled cider ale or wine and spices.
Speaker 3: But then there is the tradition of the passet posset
Speaker 3: the passet. Yes, The Smithsonian magazine website has a nice
Speaker 3: article about this titled Past the Posset colon the Medieval
Speaker 3: Eggnog by Lisa Brahman, and according to this article, it
Speaker 3: apparently dates back to late medieval Europe, and it looks
Speaker 3: like some of the examples come to us from the
Speaker 3: post medieval world and beyond. Anyway, the passet itself is
Speaker 3: a drinking vessel, as Brayman points out, and you see
Speaker 3: mention of it even in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which lady
Speaker 3: Macbeth poisons the posets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters.
Speaker 4: Oh I forgot about that.
Speaker 3: I had as well. When the author here brings it up,
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, yeah, I do remember that line vaguely.
Speaker 3: But you encounter so many archaic courts if you're reading
Speaker 3: or performing Shakespeare that you can't stop to wonder. Overall,
Speaker 3: it's enough to be like, okay, this means drinking vessel. Okay,
Speaker 3: what's the next strange word that doesn't quite register for me?
Speaker 3: Let me translate that one in my head. But this
Speaker 3: is You can actually look up examples of this vessel
Speaker 3: online the pauset, this posset, and you'll find that some
Speaker 3: of the main examples of this it looks curiously like
Speaker 3: an ornate tea pot with handles on both sides, a
Speaker 3: wide lidded aperture at the top, with a with a
Speaker 3: with a lid on top, and the stem for it,
Speaker 3: you know, like that like a t kettle. It feeds
Speaker 3: from the bottom of the vessel rather than from the
Speaker 3: middle or the top of the vessel.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: The reason for this design, according to Brayman, is that
Speaker 3: you can drink directly from the stem to get at
Speaker 3: the liquid contents of the of the of the liquid
Speaker 3: it contains, but also you can take the lid off
Speaker 3: the top and go at the top of it with
Speaker 3: a spoon, because basically you're gonna have a mixture of things.
Speaker 3: You're gonna have a fluid beneath and kind of a
Speaker 3: chonky chonky, creamy perhaps cheesy layer at the top.
Speaker 4: So this is like, it's like a curdled milk drink
Speaker 4: that has that has cheesy, floaty solid bits on the
Speaker 4: top you want to get with a spoon.
Speaker 3: Yes, the way that Brayman describes it as quote both
Speaker 3: a drink and a dessert with a layer of thick,
Speaker 3: sweet gruel floating above the liquid. Okay, so okay. On
Speaker 3: one hand, I realized that could potentially be interpreted as gross.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, I think it's not that
Speaker 3: different from a lot of sort of frothy dessert things
Speaker 3: we have today. I think about certain milkshakes, certain smoothies,
Speaker 3: certainly especially the older school cappuccinos, where the foam cap
Speaker 3: on top was maybe a little firmer, and you might
Speaker 3: have to go at that with a spoon as opposed
Speaker 3: to drinking it. So I kind of reject the idea
Speaker 3: that this potential hygiene issues aside of late medieval ages,
Speaker 3: I don't think this is necessarily that gross of an
Speaker 3: idea that you could have some sort of like a
Speaker 3: thick portion on the top of your beverage that requires
Speaker 3: a spoon. It's just like a little different to imagine
Speaker 3: this bizarre container for its consumption. Though nowadays I do
Speaker 3: want to point out we do have things like the
Speaker 3: spoon straw, which is like a plastic usually like a
Speaker 3: plastic straw and spoon combined so that you can do both.
Speaker 3: They did not have this technology in the late medieval
Speaker 3: period to my knowledge. Therefore they had to use a posset.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, it is the same principle as a straw,
Speaker 4: which I don't find unusual. But I have to say,
Speaker 4: it is funny to imagine somebody like drinking out of
Speaker 4: the stem of a tea kettle.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it does seem like you might burn your
Speaker 3: mouth with this. So recorded recipes, many of these came later.
Speaker 3: I believe they called if you were going to fill
Speaker 3: the pauset, it would call for a great deal of
Speaker 3: egg and cream. They might also call for beer, sugar,
Speaker 3: and also thickening agents such as bread, biscuits, oatmeal, and
Speaker 3: almond paste. In some cases, the upper portions are said
Speaker 3: to take on a cheesey quality, which actually brings to
Speaker 3: mind modern cheese milk tea drinks, which are quite delightful.
Speaker 3: If you haven't had one, I know this is something
Speaker 3: that can be kind of hard to imagine. Why should
Speaker 3: my milk tea taste like cheese? Well, it's it's not
Speaker 3: what you're imagining if you're imagining something that turns your stomach.
Speaker 3: It's not like cheddar cheese on the top of your tea.
Speaker 3: It's something sweetier and creamier, but with that slight cheesy
Speaker 3: twist to it, not like provolone right right now. I
Speaker 3: should also mentioned there are more contemporary pauset dishes, such
Speaker 3: as you often see recipes for something called a lemon pauset,
Speaker 3: but this seems somewhat more refined compared to what is
Speaker 3: described here. This is not something you drink out of
Speaker 3: a strange tea kettle. It's something you spoon out of
Speaker 3: a dish. But is it eggnog? Well, in many ways,
Speaker 3: if not most ways, no, But it also sounds like
Speaker 3: the sort of thing that if you were a time
Speaker 3: traveler from an eggnog having culture and you went back
Speaker 3: to the late medieval ages and you're like, where's my eggnog?
Speaker 3: And people are like, what are you talking about? You
Speaker 3: might cover the posset and be like, oh, well this
Speaker 3: will work, this will do. Now my holiday is complete.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a liquidy egg and milk or egg and
Speaker 4: cream type thing.
Speaker 3: Right, And I think it's not crazy to imagine that
Speaker 3: this sort of precedent for this sort of drink and
Speaker 3: the sort of taste sensations that it brings about, that
Speaker 3: this could feed into the very American traditions that would,
Speaker 3: according to Thomas, bring about the American eggnog.
Speaker 4: So I assume after we get out of this early
Speaker 4: period where mentions are scarce and don't really explain much
Speaker 4: about eggnog except like the Irish guy who's clearly not
Speaker 4: familiar with it, we get into a period where there
Speaker 4: is more extensive writing on eggnog, maybe like in actual
Speaker 4: cookery manuals.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot more material once you were
Speaker 3: a certain point. And wonderch has a whole chapter on
Speaker 3: egg drinks in his book im Vibe. As he writes it,
Speaker 3: there quote neither punches nor part of the lineage of
Speaker 3: cock tails, and this is also somewhat how Jerry Thomas
Speaker 3: and the people of his day would have classified them.
Speaker 3: One of the things that really amazed me about all this, though,
Speaker 3: is that Wondridge points out that egg drinks were once
Speaker 3: far more common and kind of a daily affair, but
Speaker 3: that few survive today. This kind of comes back to
Speaker 3: your example earlier about egg nog for breakfast, why not perfect,
Speaker 3: keep the fog away, etc. Now, now I should point
Speaker 3: out this is the two thousand and seven books, so
Speaker 3: I'm not sure if we've seen anything in the way
Speaker 3: of a resurgence of egg drinks. It might be the case, though,
Speaker 3: given the spirit of cocktail making and it's tend to
Speaker 3: re explore older fashions and even remake them with modern twists.
Speaker 3: I don't feel like it's tremendously uncommon to find at
Speaker 3: least a single egg drink on a fancy cocktail menu,
Speaker 3: though to be sure, you probably won't find them on
Speaker 3: just random restaurant cocktail menus, Like I don't know if
Speaker 3: Chili's offers an egg drink.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to think, what are the standard egg drinks
Speaker 4: other well, I guess there are like drinks I don't
Speaker 4: usually get, but like, aren't there like sours and fizzes
Speaker 4: and stuff that have that have egg whites in them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Wondred points out that the major survivors include the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century Tom and Jerry drink. This would be not
Speaker 3: getting into the proportions, but it's like sugar, eggs rum, cinnamon, cloves, allspice.
Speaker 3: There's the sherry flip, which is basically egg, sugar and sherry,
Speaker 3: and he discusses his elsewhere in the book. But of
Speaker 3: course there's the Ramos gin Fizz, which is pretty famous
Speaker 3: New Orleans drink that contains gin, simple syrup, lemon juice,
Speaker 3: lime juice, egg white, heavy cream, orange flower water, and
Speaker 3: club soda. It's one that famously requires a great deal
Speaker 3: of shaking. You may receive a dirty look from the
Speaker 3: bartender when you order it because of all the shaking
Speaker 3: it's going to require. Sometimes they are to pass it
Speaker 3: off to another bartender to continue shake shaking it. But
Speaker 3: it is also a delightful drink. But yeah. He Wonderage
Speaker 3: points out though that even though we only have so
Speaker 3: many drinks that kind of survived, there was this time
Speaker 3: where where egg based drinks. Egg egg based alcoholic drinks
Speaker 3: were consumed on pretty much a daily basis and were
Speaker 3: as popular as eggnog drinks are during the holiday year round.
Speaker 3: So just imagine, imagine a world in which eggnog is
Speaker 3: stocked at the grocery store year round to meet people's
Speaker 3: demand for it, and everybody's having it boozed up. Not
Speaker 3: that they bought it at the grocery store, they made it.
Speaker 3: You get my point.
Speaker 4: That's that sounds like a magical time, a very rich,
Speaker 4: rich time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But as Paul Clark points out in the Imbibed
Speaker 3: magazine article, elements egg cocktails, changing tastes and salmonella scares
Speaker 3: pretty much chased raw eggs out of the bar. And
Speaker 3: this would be kind of this would be the reason
Speaker 3: that only so many egg drinks kind of survived this
Speaker 3: period of time in which, on one hand, yet changing taste.
Speaker 3: You can imagine, perhaps you know, there are new fads
Speaker 3: in cocktails, new ingredients are more readily available for cocktails,
Speaker 3: and then there's this whole issue of salmonella.
Speaker 4: Salmonella concerns, of course, remain relevant to this day, and
Speaker 4: we'll come back to those in just a few minutes.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Wondrich also points out there was a great deal of
Speaker 3: variation when it came to eggnog recipes, which I imagine
Speaker 3: is going to be the case with any popular drink,
Speaker 3: even if the recipe isn't secret. See the Invention episode
Speaker 3: we did about the my Tie for examples of this.
Speaker 3: On both counts. If the recipe is secret, people are
Speaker 3: going to try and recreate it, and even if the
Speaker 3: secret is if there's no secret, if the recipe is
Speaker 3: well known, you're going to end up having deviations anyway.
Speaker 3: For instance, anywhere you go today the my Thie recipe,
Speaker 3: there's no telling what a restaurant will actually serve you
Speaker 3: if you order a my Tie, even though the original
Speaker 3: recipe is very well known at this point, or it's
Speaker 3: very easily obtained if you have a desire to seek
Speaker 3: it out. But these regional differences in eggnog, this would
Speaker 3: really make people emotional. A Wondred show points out this
Speaker 3: account where there's a judge who encountered eggnog in an
Speaker 3: inn and it didn't have whiskey enough in it, and
Speaker 3: therefore there was this huge altercation.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean again, going back to stories about ends,
Speaker 4: you don't say what time of day this is, But
Speaker 4: this eggnog might have been his morning eggnog, which sets
Speaker 4: the tone for the entire day. It's like, you know,
Speaker 4: if you don't get your coffee right in the morning,
Speaker 4: that's bad news.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If I don't get my heavily alcoholic eggnog in
Speaker 3: the morning, I'm no good now. Sometimes those regional differences, though,
Speaker 3: are going to be entirely based on what is available
Speaker 3: to you, And a great example of this is the
Speaker 3: Texian version of eggnog. He includes the recipe in the
Speaker 3: book Is It Stems? It Stems from General Thomas Green
Speaker 3: of the Army of the Texas Republic from eighteen forty three.
Speaker 3: The recipe serves about one hundred and sixty for seven
Speaker 3: gallons of mez cow, seven gallons of donkey milk, thirty
Speaker 3: dozen eggs, and a large loaf of sugar.
Speaker 4: I love that sugar used to come in loaves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, if you're making eggnog for one hundred and
Speaker 3: sixty and a number of these recipes do call for
Speaker 3: large vats of eggnog, but this is quite a lot.
Speaker 3: I mean, seven gallons of mezcal, seven gallons of donkey milk.
Speaker 4: I've never tasted donkey milk. I don't even know what
Speaker 4: that would be like.
Speaker 3: I again two thousand and seven book, but Wondrich mentioned
Speaker 3: that donkey milk was becoming popular at the time in
Speaker 3: Europe due to this. I supposely it had some health
Speaker 3: advantages to it. I don't know if that's true. I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's still popular as an alternative milk.
Speaker 3: I don't think I've seen it in myself in health
Speaker 3: fied stores. But then again, I'm not really in the
Speaker 3: market for donkey milk anyway. Well, Wondrich roughly translates the
Speaker 3: recipe for modern drinkers in that book. He of course
Speaker 3: says you can use cow mil instead of donkey milk,
Speaker 3: and he also recommends grating a little chocolate on top.
Speaker 3: So Jerry Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and
Speaker 3: wonder Wich includes recipes for three of them in his book.
Speaker 3: Roughly speaking, these are the contents of these three that
Speaker 3: he shares. There's Baltimore eggnog, eggs sugar, nutmeg, brandy or
Speaker 3: rum wine, egg whites and milk. There's eggnog individual, which
Speaker 3: calls for sugar, cold water, egg cognac, Santa Cruz, rum
Speaker 3: and milk. And then there's General Harrison's agnog. This is
Speaker 3: ninth American President, William Henry Harrison, and this was said
Speaker 3: to be one of his favorites. It called for egg sugar,
Speaker 3: hard cider, and lumps of ice. Important to note here
Speaker 3: that cider drinking was part of his brand. His whole
Speaker 3: image that he tried to put out was like, I'm
Speaker 3: not really at home in this old Washington environment. I
Speaker 3: just want to sit on the porch and drink some
Speaker 3: hard cider. Won't you have some of my hard cider
Speaker 3: based aggnog and vote for me? Yeah?
Speaker 4: That was him saying like, I'm just a you know,
Speaker 4: a hard working frontiersman. I'm not one of these elites.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I don't know. I mean, I appreciate hard cider,
Speaker 3: but this sounds horrific. I don't think I would I
Speaker 3: would want any part of this. So General Harrison, no,
Speaker 3: thank you.
Speaker 4: General Harrison also died about some like thirty days into
Speaker 4: his first presidential term. Yeah, he's the one who he
Speaker 4: didn't really make it very far. And their speculation about
Speaker 4: why he died, but one of them is that he
Speaker 4: may have succumbed to the fact that the water supply
Speaker 4: at the White House at the time was heavily contaminated
Speaker 4: with raw sewage.
Speaker 3: Huh interesting. I had a whole tangent for this episode
Speaker 3: about twelfth US President Zachary Taylor, who fell ill with
Speaker 3: a fatal illness on July fourth of eighteen fifty after
Speaker 3: a DC fundraiser that he had tended where he quote
Speaker 3: drank freely of iced water and chilled milk. According to
Speaker 3: biographer K. Jack Bauer in the book Zachary Taylor's Soldier,
Speaker 3: Planter Statesman of the Old Southwest. So I've seen this
Speaker 3: described as copious amounts of cherries and iced milk. Apparently
Speaker 3: he preferred drinking chilled milk. That was his thing. That
Speaker 3: was the hardest drink that Zachary Taylor was known to
Speaker 3: imbibe himself. But I cut most of this out because
Speaker 3: he wasn't drinking, as far as I can tell, a
Speaker 3: cherry chilled milk concoction. It was just chilled milk and
Speaker 3: then also a lot of cherries.
Speaker 4: And probably plenty of raw sewage.
Speaker 3: Is it time for salmonella?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, that's a great transition. So eggs and salmonilla.
Speaker 4: Salmonilla remains probably the main reason we have reservations about
Speaker 4: raw egg based food and drinks today. Salmonella is a
Speaker 4: genus of bacteria named not after salmon the fish, but
Speaker 4: after an American veterinarian named Daniel Elmer Salmon. Though it
Speaker 4: was not discovered by him, it was named after him
Speaker 4: basically because a species of Salmonella was discovered by an
Speaker 4: assistant in a lab who worked for salmon. The assistant's
Speaker 4: name was Theobald Smith, but of course the boss gets
Speaker 4: all the glory. Some zero types of salmonella are responsible
Speaker 4: for really serious and historically significant diseases, such as typhoid fever,
Speaker 4: but multiple types of salmonilla will result in infections of
Speaker 4: the intestinal tract, so salmonilla infection or salmonellosis, is one
Speaker 4: of the most common food born illnesses, often characterized by fever, diarrhea,
Speaker 4: severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and headache. And because salmonella
Speaker 4: is often transmitted through the fecal oral route, the risk
Speaker 4: of contracting it is higher when people don't have access
Speaker 4: to clean drinking water and effective sewage disposal. Though salmonella
Speaker 4: can also be transmitted between animals and humans, so animal
Speaker 4: vectors such as eggs from infected chickens can be a
Speaker 4: major source of salmonellosis in humans as well. Now, on
Speaker 4: the other hand, one thing to remember is that most
Speaker 4: eggs are fine. Most eggs are not infected with salmonilla.
Speaker 4: I don't know what the exact proportion is, but one
Speaker 4: figure I saw kicking around from the two thousands was
Speaker 4: a CDC estimate that roughly one in every twenty thousand
Speaker 4: chicken eggs in the United States was contaminated. That number
Speaker 4: may be different today. If so, it's probably somewhat lower
Speaker 4: than that. But you know, I'm not saying you should
Speaker 4: go about eating raw eggs. There is definitely risk there,
Speaker 4: but also like the odds are pretty low that any
Speaker 4: given egg is going to make you sick. Also, eggs
Speaker 4: are fine if you cook them to the proper temperature
Speaker 4: for the proper time. One hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 4: will kill just about anything instantly. Also, you know, even
Speaker 4: lower temperatures, if held for a sufficient amount of time,
Speaker 4: will be enough to basically sterilize eggs. This is you
Speaker 4: can look up charts on the amount of time eggs
Speaker 4: need to spend at a certain temperature in order to
Speaker 4: make them safe. However, eggnog is traditionally not made with
Speaker 4: eggs that are cooked at all, but rather with raw ones.
Speaker 4: So is there any risk, Well, yes, obviously if you
Speaker 4: are just drinking raw eggs straight up, there is some
Speaker 4: risk of salmonilla infection. One example of this, I mean
Speaker 4: it happens all the time, but one example one case
Speaker 4: study I dug up with an interesting secondary finding. This
Speaker 4: is a study published in the Lancet in nineteen seven
Speaker 4: by Steer at All called person to person spread of
Speaker 4: Salmonella typhimurium after a hospital common source outbreak. So the
Speaker 4: abstract reads, in September nineteen seventy three, diarrhea caused by
Speaker 4: Salmonella typhemurium developed in thirty two people in a main hospital.
Speaker 4: Both epidemiological and microbiological evidence indicated that raw egg beaten
Speaker 4: in milk for eggnog was responsible for the infection. However,
Speaker 4: six patients and eight employees had not had eggnog, and
Speaker 4: their illness developed after the source of infection had been
Speaker 4: recognized and removed. Most of these people had had direct
Speaker 4: contact with an infected patient and presumably acquired the infection
Speaker 4: by person to person spread. It's concluded that person to
Speaker 4: person spread of Salmonilla typhemurium can occur in hospitals and
Speaker 4: can be a hazard to patients and staff. So initially
Speaker 4: a bunch of people in a hospital got salmonella from
Speaker 4: drinking eggnog, but then those people gave secondary infections to
Speaker 4: others who didn't even touch the nog. Also, I wanted
Speaker 4: to share another medical journal article I found just because
Speaker 4: I thought it was very weird. This is called Eyelid
Speaker 4: absess in an eggnog Drinker by Marcus and Wolverson, published
Speaker 4: in the British Medical Journal nineteen eighty nine. Short story
Speaker 4: is a seventy two year old man showed up at
Speaker 4: a hospital in England with a huge abscess swelling on
Speaker 4: his left upper eyelid, which they eventually determined had spread
Speaker 4: to an infection of the bone in his forehead, the
Speaker 4: bone above where his eye was. So he was put
Speaker 4: under general anesthesia and the absess was drained. They did
Speaker 4: a culture of the pus and it revealed the presence
Speaker 4: of a type of salmonella. They eventually did another procedure
Speaker 4: to take care of the swelling in the bones of
Speaker 4: the face, and he eventually made a full recovery. The
Speaker 4: man had no gastrointestinal symptoms, and the authors say that
Speaker 4: there had been recent cases of salmonilla infection related to eggs,
Speaker 4: so they asked him about his diet, and here I'm
Speaker 4: going to read from the case report. His diet consisted
Speaker 4: of West Indian and European food, but he said that
Speaker 4: he cooked all eggs well. When he was seen in
Speaker 4: the outpatient department, he was specifically asked if he drank eggnog,
Speaker 4: and he then admitted drinking it frequently, using a recipe
Speaker 4: of raw eggs, brandy, sugar, milk, and vanilla essence. Now,
Speaker 4: the authors say they could find no previous evidence of
Speaker 4: this particular type of salmonella causing an eyelid absess, but
Speaker 4: that there are other known cases of this bacterial infection
Speaker 4: spreading from a gut infection originally to a secondary infection
Speaker 4: elsewhere in the body, such as in the bones, especially
Speaker 4: the long bones, especially in patients with underlying medical conditions
Speaker 4: and in patients over seventy years of age. And finally,
Speaker 4: the author's write quote from nineteen eighty one to nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty six, the proportion of salmonilla infections caused by salmonella,
Speaker 4: and then they're talking about a specific type here. Salmonella
Speaker 4: in teriditis rose from eleven percent to twenty eight percent.
Speaker 4: This rise was due mainly to a rise in phage
Speaker 4: type four infections. Transmission of this phage type has been
Speaker 4: increasingly associated with poultry, and it is now known to
Speaker 4: be transmitted in eggs. Egg born Salmonilla in teroditis is
Speaker 4: destroyed by thorough cooking. The raw egg in the eggnog
Speaker 4: may have been the vehicle of infection. Unless specifically asked for,
Speaker 4: a history of eggnog drinking may not emerge on dietary questioning.
Speaker 4: But okay, now, I'm sure a lot of people out
Speaker 4: there are wondering, Wait a minute. Okay, Obviously, you know
Speaker 4: you mix up a bunch of raw eggs and you
Speaker 4: just drink that, that definitely is putting you at risk.
Speaker 4: But if you put alcohol in the eggnog, surely that
Speaker 4: would be safe.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Doesn't alcohol kill germs?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And we're talking a lot of alcohol in some
Speaker 3: of these recipes.
Speaker 4: Now, frustratingly, I have not been able to put together
Speaker 4: a very clear answer on the exact relationship between alcohol
Speaker 4: content and raw egg safety. Instead, I've sort of assembled
Speaker 4: some different conflicting data points, but I'll share a few
Speaker 4: of the results I came across. So one thing I
Speaker 4: found is a study in the International Journal of Food
Speaker 4: Microbiology published in nineteen ninety called survival of pathogenic microorganisms
Speaker 4: in an eggnog like product containing seven percent ethanol. This
Speaker 4: is by notermans at all, so this is a lab test.
Speaker 4: They say, let's make some boozy eggnog and directly inject
Speaker 4: pathogenic microorganisms in there and see what happens. They say
Speaker 4: a liquor consisting of whole egg sacros meaning sugar twenty
Speaker 4: five percent and ethanol of seven percent was artificially contaminated
Speaker 4: with Salmonella teriditis, salmonilla, typhomurium, Staphylococcus aureus, three different strains
Speaker 4: Basillus sirius, and Listeria, and they say, after three weeks
Speaker 4: of incubation at twenty two degrees celsius, twenty two degrees
Speaker 4: celsius is about seventy one degrees fahrenheit room temperature, the
Speaker 4: numbers of salmonilla, Staphylococcus aureus, and of the Listeria species
Speaker 4: they use decreased by more than three log base ten
Speaker 4: units and if I understand correctly, I believe that's a
Speaker 4: ninety nine point nine percent reduction in the number of
Speaker 4: bacteria units. There they say under such conditions, however, the
Speaker 4: total number of micro organisms increased three log ten units.
Speaker 4: Then they say had four degrees celsius. So I think
Speaker 4: this would be simulating refrigerator temperatures. The decrease of pathogenic
Speaker 4: microorganisms was much slower, and a decrease of three log
Speaker 4: based ten units was observed only after seven weeks of incubation.
Speaker 4: So this study finds eggnog without alcohol incubated at room temperature. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's you allow populations of salmonilla and staff to explode.
Speaker 4: But in this study, the presence of seven percent straight
Speaker 4: ethanol significantly reduced the amount of salmonilla staff in listeria
Speaker 4: over the course of three weeks at room temperature and
Speaker 4: over the course of seven weeks at fridge temperature. However,
Speaker 4: other microorganisms can grow.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure this recipe for egnog that they used
Speaker 3: is the doctor cushion catheter, right, recipe for agnog with
Speaker 3: all of these added diseases.
Speaker 4: M you can just imagine Christopher Lee drooling over it. Well,
Speaker 4: the Stanton twins dance, but the amount of alcohol clearly matters.
Speaker 4: One highly cited informal experiment. This was not published in
Speaker 4: a scientific journal as far as I can tell, but
Speaker 4: it was done and reported on by NPR for Science Friday.
Speaker 4: It was done in the late two thousands by microbiologists
Speaker 4: at the at Rockefeller University named Vince Faschetti and Raymond
Speaker 4: Schuck and it was covered on Science Friday. And apparently
Speaker 4: these researchers used a recipe that the staff at the
Speaker 4: university would make every year, which originally traced back to
Speaker 4: the great American microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield. So this is her
Speaker 4: original eggnog recipe. She had worked at Rockefeller University decades earlier.
Speaker 4: Apparently they're still making her eggnog years after she passed away.
Speaker 4: And the recipe includes raw eggs, but also cream, sugar,
Speaker 4: and a lot of hard liquor. The liquors in this
Speaker 4: version are bourbon and rum. NPR reported that the alcohol
Speaker 4: concentration of the final drink was about twenty percent, and
Speaker 4: the way they would do it is every year they'd
Speaker 4: make it before Thanksgiving and then enjoy it around Christmas time,
Speaker 4: so it had an incubation period in the refrigerator of
Speaker 4: about six weeks. So for this experiment, the researchers made
Speaker 4: their usual knog, but they deliberately spiked it once again
Speaker 4: with salmonilla. They just you can watch a video of this.
Speaker 4: They're just injecting this orange juice into the eggs. It's disgusting,
Speaker 4: they say. They put in the amount of salmonella you
Speaker 4: would expect from including about somewhere between one and ten
Speaker 4: contaminated eggs, and then they took samples at various stages
Speaker 4: of preparation and incubation to see what grew over the
Speaker 4: course of the next three weeks. So egg plus salmonilla
Speaker 4: with no alcohol, that's just it formed a solid mat
Speaker 4: of salmony. Just huge boom, millions of bacteria. Disgusting.
Speaker 3: You can need your spoon and your poset for that
Speaker 3: one ugh.
Speaker 4: Egg plus salmonella plus alcohol with the sample taken immediately
Speaker 4: after mixing give you a modest reduction, but still plenty
Speaker 4: of salmonilla growth. This would still absolutely make you sick.
Speaker 4: Egg plus salmonella plus alcohol, but one day after mixing,
Speaker 4: still plenty of salmonilla, but less than the one taken
Speaker 4: right after mixing. One week later, there was noticeably less
Speaker 4: bacterial growth, but they said still probably enough to make
Speaker 4: you sick. But then the sample from three weeks later
Speaker 4: there's nothing, no bacterial growth at all. So somewhere between
Speaker 4: one week and three weeks this batch went from biohazard
Speaker 4: to presumably safe. Though I noticed that the Science Friday
Speaker 4: report made a joke about like the researchers themselves are
Speaker 4: joking about this. They said, you know, we could really
Speaker 4: commit to our result and just drink it, but maybe not,
Speaker 4: which makes sense, right, like why risk it? And that
Speaker 4: kind of spirit comes through in a lot of the
Speaker 4: other sources I've seen talking about whether alcohol will render
Speaker 4: your eggnog safe, because it seems clear there's evidence that
Speaker 4: at least in some cases, even if you got unlucky
Speaker 4: enough and got a contaminated egg, given enough alcohol and
Speaker 4: enough time, the nog would probably be safe. But there
Speaker 4: are a lot of variables here, and so it seems
Speaker 4: like a bunch of public health and food safety sources
Speaker 4: are still cautious. They're still kind of cagy about giving
Speaker 4: the green light on this, and they default to saying
Speaker 4: that if you want to be sure you're safe, you
Speaker 4: should use pasteurized eggs from a carton which have been
Speaker 4: rendered safe by preheating in the facility where they were packaged,
Speaker 4: or they also recommend cooking the eggs basically like sources
Speaker 4: citing experts at the FDA or the USDA say that
Speaker 4: you can't always count on alcohol to kill potential bacterial
Speaker 4: content of raw eggs, and if you want to be safe,
Speaker 4: the eggs should be cooked. You can do this by
Speaker 4: like mixing the eggs and milk together and gently bringing
Speaker 4: up to one hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit while stirring
Speaker 4: to kill any possible bacterial content before you add the
Speaker 4: other ingredients. So personally, I don't know exactly where we
Speaker 4: are left here. I will say it looks like some
Speaker 4: experiments do show that alcohol content will at least often,
Speaker 4: maybe not always, but will at least often neutralize the
Speaker 4: main bacteria that people are worried about, meaning salmonilla, given
Speaker 4: enough alcohol and enough time. And I will say that
Speaker 4: I also, just speaking for myself, not giving advice to
Speaker 4: other people, have personally drunk eggnog made in this way
Speaker 4: with raw eggs but with lots of alcohol content, and
Speaker 4: personally I felt fine about it. But it also looks
Speaker 4: like some experts still have concerns that this might not
Speaker 4: always work, and caution that if you want to make
Speaker 4: sure you're safe, you should cook your eggs or use
Speaker 4: a pasteurized product.
Speaker 3: I mean this is also enough to make one rethink
Speaker 3: eating raw cookie dough and so forth.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean, well, it's true, I guess of
Speaker 4: anything with raw eggs in it, like, there is always
Speaker 4: some small amount of risk. You know, some small proportion
Speaker 4: of eggs out there are going to be infected. Most
Speaker 4: eggs are fine, but some are going to have salmonella
Speaker 4: in them, So you're always running that risk. And I guess,
Speaker 4: I guess some of the difficulty comes from not just
Speaker 4: whether or not you will accept the risk, but from
Speaker 4: not knowing exactly how risky it is. Like you can't
Speaker 4: come up, you don't have a number, you know, to
Speaker 4: say like, Okay, I have this percent chance of getting
Speaker 4: salmonilla if I do this instead, you just have a
Speaker 4: vague sense that I have some small chance, and I
Speaker 4: don't know exactly what that chance is.
Speaker 3: But in a way, that's It's the holiday season. It's
Speaker 3: about it's about thinking about your chances of survival. A
Speaker 3: winter festivity that is supposed to get you through the
Speaker 3: darkest portion of the year and hopefully see about the
Speaker 3: resurrection of the living world.
Speaker 4: That's quite beautifully put. But on the other hand, I'll
Speaker 4: just say, like, you know, if you're not your yeah,
Speaker 4: just cook your eggs or just use the past yourized thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's fine now. Last year unstuff to blow
Speaker 3: your mind. We did an entire episode looking at the
Speaker 3: major award leg lamp from a Christmas Story, the nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties holiday classic film, and you know, looking at this
Speaker 3: leg shaped lamp and finding predecessors to this in the
Speaker 3: ancient world. In a similar way, I would like to
Speaker 3: at the close of this episode on eggnog, consider the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty nine holiday film Christmas Vacation, which of course
Speaker 3: starred a great cast Chevy Chase, Beverly Dangelo, Randy Quaid,
Speaker 3: among others. But there are at least a couple of
Speaker 3: key scenes in this movie in which the Griswold family
Speaker 3: drink eggnog from glass goblets made in the likeness of
Speaker 3: the Wally World moose. These are you can actually buy
Speaker 3: these now, this is an actual product. But in the
Speaker 3: movie they are these these little glass goblets, and they
Speaker 3: have big glass moose antlers on either side, and there's
Speaker 3: a big droopy moose snout on the front. You hold
Speaker 3: it by the ear and you sip your eggnog that way,
Speaker 3: or you gulp it, as it happens to be the
Speaker 3: case in some of the scenes.
Speaker 4: I imagine the moose face has to be facing out
Speaker 4: or else the snout would sort of prevent you from
Speaker 4: from getting it to your lips.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, you'd have to hold the glass in just
Speaker 3: the right way. It's a ceremonial vessel. And I started
Speaker 3: looking around as thinking, I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 3: if there's going to be something in the ancient world
Speaker 3: that matches up with this. But luckily, once more, eighties
Speaker 3: holiday movie prop design is in line with the manufacture
Speaker 3: of artifacts in the ancient world. I would like to
Speaker 3: discuss the ryton. This is generally spelled r hytn and
Speaker 3: it is a style of head cup that appears in
Speaker 3: various forms throughout the ancient world, according to Mara Abd
Speaker 3: el Maghwud al Kadi in Forms and functions of rytons
Speaker 3: in Ptotomaic Egypt. According to this author, they were likely
Speaker 3: Persian in origin and were particularly popular during the Acaimenid
Speaker 3: dynasty of five point fifty through three point thirty PCE.
Speaker 3: You can look up images of the ryton and the
Speaker 3: various versions of the ryton that appear in different times
Speaker 3: and different cultures. One can roughly compare these two a
Speaker 3: drinking horn like you know, the hollowed horn of a beast,
Speaker 3: but the design and function here is a little more involved.
Speaker 3: So imagine a drinking horn in which the slender part
Speaker 3: of the horn, the tapering part of the horn, is
Speaker 3: in the likeness of an animal's head, or in the
Speaker 3: like the front half of an animal. And we don't
Speaker 3: have time in this episode to really dig into the
Speaker 3: variation and the different cultural takes in this episode. But again,
Speaker 3: this would have been a realistic drinking vessel. This would
Speaker 3: not be something you would bust out, I would imagine
Speaker 3: for your just everyday consumption. This would be for ceremonial drinking.
Speaker 3: And there are essentially two types of ryton. In one form,
Speaker 3: you drink from the slender part of the ryton, holding
Speaker 3: it above one's head or roughly you know, above one's
Speaker 3: head or at least parallel with one's head by either
Speaker 3: twin handles on the side, or from some other kind
Speaker 3: of of handle that's a fixed to the object, or
Speaker 3: even from sort of the horn itself. In other forms,
Speaker 3: one drinks from the wide portion of the ryton, So
Speaker 3: the whole thing is more like a traditional goblet, except
Speaker 3: many of these designs would require you know, gripping by
Speaker 3: the horns or by the or the antlers that are
Speaker 3: on it. If there are antlers on it, and you
Speaker 3: might not be able to set it down, it might
Speaker 3: not have a bottom to it.
Speaker 4: Wow, well that that almost suggests a certain way to drink.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again this would be highly ritual, so it's
Speaker 3: not about setting your drink aside and then doing other things.
Speaker 3: You're not going to do any paperwork. This is probably
Speaker 3: part of some ritual I don't know. You can easily
Speaker 3: imagine some sort of warrior's feast, etc.
Speaker 4: Right, you can't drink it while you're podcasting. It's maybe
Speaker 4: to drink from while people stand around you chanting drink Right.
Speaker 3: So there are various beautiful examples of the ryton, but
Speaker 3: the one that really brought to my mind the Wally
Speaker 3: World mug is the Stag's Head ryton, dating to four
Speaker 3: hundred BCE. This is a silver artifact that actually made
Speaker 3: headlines just last year due to its three point five
Speaker 3: million dollar appraisal value and its presence among stolen antiquities
Speaker 3: that were found in the possession of billionaire Michael Steinhardt.
Speaker 3: You can look up articles on that again from just
Speaker 3: last year. The item was apparently eluded from a museum
Speaker 3: in Turkey originally, but I'm unsure exactly actly when the
Speaker 3: looting occurred, other than sometime during the twentieth century during
Speaker 3: a time of unrest, which that only narrows it down
Speaker 3: so much concerning the twentieth century, though it does seem
Speaker 3: to be of ancient Greek manufacturer somewhere in the region
Speaker 3: of the Black Sea, probably from the fifth century BCE.
Speaker 3: And with this one, you'd apparently drink from the stag's
Speaker 3: lower lip while holding it aloft, though not by the antlers,
Speaker 3: as is visible in many photos of this particular artifact.
Speaker 3: There's this curved handle behind the neck. Oh, I see it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So the question remains, is the Wally World mug a
Speaker 3: ryton No, it's not. No, it's not. Yes, it's first
Speaker 3: of all, it's not horn shaped. It also doesn't you
Speaker 3: don't drink from the moose's lips though that alone wouldn't
Speaker 3: disqualify it from being a ryton. As we previously noted, though,
Speaker 3: I've included a picture for you, Joe, of a ryton
Speaker 3: that would involve you drinking from the wide portion as
Speaker 3: opposed to the beast lips you can sort of see.
Speaker 3: So this one would be very much a situation where
Speaker 3: you have this kind of like I don't know, bronze
Speaker 3: or golden chalice, and you wouldn't be able to set
Speaker 3: it down because instead of having a flat surface, flat
Speaker 3: bottom on the bottom of your goblet, there is like
Speaker 3: the head of a ram down there. Yeah, so you'd
Speaker 3: have to lay it on its side, I guess, in
Speaker 3: which case you would either spill what you were drinking
Speaker 3: or you would have to have consumed it all.
Speaker 4: Once again, the medium is the message here. This is
Speaker 4: technology that shows that by necessity, shows you a way
Speaker 4: to use it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. However, I will say the Wally World mug is
Speaker 3: the likeness of a moose head. It is the likeness
Speaker 3: of an animal's head. It also is a ceremonial drinking vessel. Clearly,
Speaker 3: the Grizwolds are not drinking out of these year round.
Speaker 3: They're busting them out for the holidays, and just as
Speaker 3: some of these artifacts, such as the stag, were decorated
Speaker 3: with warrior images and images of battle, and we can
Speaker 3: imagine the ceremonies they involve, probably a ligne with some
Speaker 3: sort of warrior ethos. We do see Clark Griswold drinking
Speaker 3: copious amounts of nog while working cousin Eddie up for violence,
Speaker 3: though curiously I had to go back. I was imagining this,
Speaker 3: remembering this scene incorrectly, the scene where Clark Griswold is
Speaker 3: throwing back a whole bunch of eggnog and talking about
Speaker 3: how he wishes somebody would kidnap his boss. He's curiously
Speaker 3: not drinking from one of the moose goblets in this scene.
Speaker 3: Oh so, I don't know. I don't know what the
Speaker 3: reason for that is. You'd think you'd want him drinking
Speaker 3: out of the moose. Maybe it's just because it's harder
Speaker 3: to hold. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's to show in a subtle way that Clark
Speaker 4: is actually coldly calculating in the scene and he's not
Speaker 4: as drunk as it would suggest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a whole topic for another time. Trying to
Speaker 3: figure out Clark Griswold. How do we feel about Clark Griswold,
Speaker 3: about his motivations and his desires in Christmas Vacation.
Speaker 4: Clark is neutral, evils cousin Randy Quaid. I'd say chaotic neutral.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. All right, So again, not really
Speaker 3: a Ryton in Christmas Vacation, But I think we might
Speaker 3: well imagine a scene from an alternate dimension in which
Speaker 3: there's a scene in Christmas Vacation in which Clark Griswold
Speaker 3: holds aloft the mighty Wally the moose Ryton, this big
Speaker 3: glass moose head or perhaps it's silver in this scenario,
Speaker 3: a big silver moose head. Perhaps you grip it by
Speaker 3: the antlers, and he's allowing cousin Eddie to then drink
Speaker 3: nourishing nod from the lips of the moose before he
Speaker 3: sends him out into glorious battle against the enemies of Christmas. Bravo.
Speaker 3: All right, that's all I have.
Speaker 4: God bless us everyone.
Speaker 3: Yes, I will say also, I fortunately finished my egg
Speaker 3: nog before we got to the draining of abscesses, so
Speaker 3: hopefully that calibrates the podcast episode for anyone out there
Speaker 3: who's like, oh, well, Rob's having an eggnog. I should
Speaker 3: have an eggnog for this listening experience. I hope that
Speaker 3: you too, were finished before the abscesses were drained.
Speaker 4: Why are you saying that, Rob?
Speaker 3: Are you saying that?
Speaker 4: Otherwise it would suggest the mental image that your glass
Speaker 4: of creamy mixture is what's out coming out of the abscess.
Speaker 3: Yes, that it is a goblet of holiday puss, which
Speaker 3: you might be drinking from the glass ahead of a moose,
Speaker 3: which doesn't help, or from the lips of a moose.
Speaker 1: Right on.
Speaker 4: I guess Merry Christmas everybody.
Speaker 3: All right, Yeah, we're going to go and close it
Speaker 3: out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out
Speaker 3: there if you have. I mean a lot of people
Speaker 3: out there are going to have some sort of holiday
Speaker 3: tradition involving some manner of eggnog. We didn't really have
Speaker 3: time to get into all the variations, but I know
Speaker 3: there are some. I think I've had, like a Puerto
Speaker 3: Rican variation of eggnog before that was quite delightful. There's
Speaker 3: so many different regional variations. Familytions, Please write in. We'd
Speaker 3: love to hear your take on all of this. In
Speaker 3: the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 3: Mind is a science podcast with our core episodes on
Speaker 3: Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form
Speaker 3: artifact or monster fact. On Mondays we do a listener
Speaker 3: mail episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious
Speaker 3: concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird
Speaker 3: House Cinema.
Speaker 4: Huge thanks to our audio producer, Max Williams. If you
Speaker 4: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 4: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 4: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 4: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 4: dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.