Holiday Inventions 3: Goblet of Eggnog

In this special holiday episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history and invention of the eggnog, how it became such an iconic holiday beverage and some curious historic goblets associated with the consumption of this rich, milky draught. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. It's
at that time of year again. Uh, and by that time,
I mean it is the holidays. We're knee deep, perhaps

(00:25):
waist deep in the holidays, and there's no going back.
We might as well just push forward at this point,
like it's just as much just as much effort to
keep going as it would be to turn back. So
once more, we have a holiday episode for you. It's
actually going to be our third installment in our Holiday
Invention series, where we more or less give the invention

(00:47):
treatment to various holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year
we're going to be looking in earnest at eggnog. Is
eggnog an invention? Sure, we can stretch the definition. I
think that's okay. I think so. I mean, we did
an invention, a full blown invention episode about the my Tie,
which we you know, we had Jeff Beach Bumbarrion as

(01:09):
a guest talk about that eggnogg is not something that
occurs naturally in the world. It must be made at
some point there had to be a first or something
like a first, and you know, we'll get into that
and and it's one of those things that has a
number of different customs and in cultural details surrounding it. Now, Joe,
I'm not sure what your relationship with eggnog happens to be,

(01:30):
because I don't know that we've ever really spoken about this.
I don't think we've had eggnog together before. Uh, not
that I recall, But my family's general approach is originally
by a carton of almond nogg each year, largely for
our son because he gets super into it. And if
I have a chance to visit a like an upscale
um like cocktail place or a nice restaurant, then then

(01:53):
I will jump at the opportunity to order an egg
nogg if they have one on the menu. Um. In
the past, I've made it down to New Orleans for
the start of beach Bumberries Sippins Santa festivities at beach
Bumberry's latitude twenty nine. They also have pop ups all
over the place, and uh, they'll generally have at least
one holiday tiky beverage on there that is at least

(02:15):
eggnog esque in form I'm picturing piles of crushed or
pellet ice with kind of a frothy, creamy uh grime
about them, and some nutmegs sprinkled over top. Oh yeah,
the nutmeg, as we'll discuss is, is pretty essential. So
I didn't make it down there this year, but I
did make it over to a tiki bar in um

(02:38):
in our area, Decatur's s Os Tke Bar, and I
enjoyed a frozen take on the classic eggnog. Um. It's
generally a rich drink, though, so once twice three times
per year max. That's generally enough for me. Now. Before
we came in here, though, I mentioned to my wife
that I was about to record the eggnog episode, and
she was kind enough to provide me with an entire

(02:59):
glass of egg nog here for me to consume during
this episode. Um, the listeners at home, you'll have to
take my word for it, Joe. I think you can
see it on the video feed here. Wait, is this
is this full booze eggnog? Or well you you might
well presume that, but I couldn't possibly comment. Yes, creamy, rich,

(03:22):
hint of nutmeg, beautiful. I have no eggnog in the house.
A cute, cute, Joe Pesci and Home Alone saying eggnog,
eggnog dressed as a cop like eggnog is the most
disgusting substance on earth. And you know what, as a child,
I that that was pretty much where my head was at.
I was like, yeah, Joe Pesci and Home Alone is correct.

(03:43):
I found the idea revolting, not just revolting, I think
I I think I probably found it borderline nauseating to
think of a drink made out of eggs. Something changed
over the years. Now I find it quite delightful. So
it was the eggs that threw you off? Yeah, you're
gonna drink eggs? I don't know. So I think about eggs.
There's something that, you know, I liked eggs scrambled like

(04:06):
they make them at the cracker barrel. Uh you know
that I'm thinking of like a thick, uh yellow curd
like substance, and and always in savory context. I mean,
I know obviously now that eggs are used in all
kinds of baking and sweet context, but that's not how,
not how I thought about them when I was a kid.
So the idea of drinking a sweet egg based beverage

(04:28):
was absolutely uh vile to my brain. I can understand that.
I mean, especially even the name is a bit potentially
off putting. It's very forward with the egg. What you
were about to drink contains eggs, and then the nog
also can throw one for a curve. I do like
some of the archaic spellings of eggnog that I've encountered

(04:49):
researching this episode. Oftentimes the way we encounter it now
it's e G G you know G, But some of
these other spellings will be e G G you know
g G. I like the double the double gs occurring
in both parts of the work. That's just symmetry, that's
good branding. Yes, now, before we proceed, I guess we
should go ahead and drive home exactly what egg nog is.

(05:12):
We've alluded to it a little bit already, but technically
it's a milk egg drink or a milk egg punch.
And we've of course reached the point as a as
a civilization where you, sir, you can have something that
is identifiable as a noog without the presence of egg
or dairy. But historically, this is the realm from which
this beverage arises. Right, So you're you you mentioned almond nogg.

(05:36):
I guess that is equivalent in the same way that
you might have almond milk. It is a substitute for milk. Yeah,
though I guess it's even more like some people get
up in arms, especially the dairy industry, I know about
things that are not milk calling themselves milk. And even
more to the point, I guess something like a soy
nog or an almond nog is going to have neither
eggs nor dairy, and so it's even further removed. But

(05:59):
yet it's still very much in the spirit of the
of the classic noggs, So I think it more than qualifies. Yeah,
nog is a thick, creamy, sweet drink. Yes, it's a
state of mind. Um, it's a it's a it's it's
a holiday tradition. Now, one of the sources I'm gonna
refer back to several times in this episode is the

(06:19):
excellent book Imbibe exclamation Point by David Wandridge, which is
a text that we've referenced in the show in the past.
It is one of, if not the best books you
can pick up on the history of the American cocktail.
This is a great book. It cites, among many others,
the legendary professor Jerry Thomas who lived eighteen thirty five,

(06:40):
the New Orleans bartender who wrote the Seminal Bartender's Guide
and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general. Um, I think
we're going too more depth on this. In an older
episode or episodes that we did together on Mixology, I
think we ended up talking about absent a lot in those. Yeah,
that would make sense, and I know, Um, Jerry Thomas

(07:03):
also comes up in the recent episode on ice. Uh
the interview that I did. But according to one which
basic milk punches go back to the late sixteen hundreds
and to give you an example of what a milk
punch consists of. And again this is not an egg
milk punch, This is just a milk punch. Wonder which
includes a recipe from Jerry Thomas. Jerry Thomas would have,

(07:24):
you know, brought up together a bunch of these different
recipes for drinks and and put them in his own
book at the time. This particular recipe from Jerry Thomas
calls for sugar water, brandy, rum and shaved ice, A
little nutmeg goes on top, and uh. Wonderage includes a
quote from Uh. This is an eight quote from the

(07:44):
Brooklyn Eagle that states that this punch was quote the
surest thing in the world to get drunk on, and
so fearfully drunk that you won't know whether you are
a cow yourself or some other foolish thing. That's that's good. Uh. Well, now,
one thing I have to point out is that when

(08:04):
you listed the ingredients, you did not list milk. So
I assume these are the things that are added to
the milk. Yes, yes, yeah, the milk would would also
be an important part of this. Uh. It's so already
we're kind of in the territory of what we think
of when we think about egg non but of course
there are no eggs there now when it comes to

(08:25):
egg nog itself. Um. Thomas was very much of the
opinion that egg nog was quote a beverage of American origin,
and wondered states that quote the drinks earliest mentions come
from a eight Philadelphia newspaper, and all the other mentions
are American, and if early European travelers to the United
States viewed it as one of the novelties Americans were

(08:46):
inflicting on the art of drinking. By the eighteen sixties,
it was a drink of comfortable middle age with a wide,
if strictly seasonal popularity. When Thomas added that in the
North quote it is a favorite of all seasons, he
was certainly overstating the case. So you bring up that
mentioned in the newspaper and this, uh, this name drop

(09:09):
of eggnog as a recipe is also referenced in a
great source I found that was aimed at unearthing the
etymological history of eggnog, because it's obvious why the word
egg is in the name. There are eggs in it,
But what exactly is anog? Could, as the Simpsons proposed,
you equally whip up a cauldron of corn nog. Cornog

(09:30):
sounds kind of delicious, like it brings to mind like
corn puddings. I think it occurs in the Simpsons episode
with the hurricane, when the stores are there's a run
on the Quickie Martin. The only things left on the
shelves are corn nogg and wadded beef. But anyway, diving
into the history and etymology of eggnog or corn nog whatever,

(09:53):
what have you? Any noggs h My source here is
a December two thousand nine article called the Origins of
Ignag holiday Grog by the American linguist and language columnist
Ben Zimmer, who is brother of the excellent science writer
Carl Zimmer, who has been a guest on the show before.
So so here's what Ben Zimmer says about nog. The

(10:14):
word nog first shows up as a regional term in England,
specifically in the region of East Anglias as the eastern
part of the country containing Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and
it referred that term. They're referred to a type of beer.
We know this because of a letter written from the

(10:36):
County of Norfolk in the year six three by a
man named Humphrey Pridou, who described quote a bottle of
old strong beer, which in this country they call nag.
So nag is high gravity beer. It's it's strong stuff.
But to take one step back, why would the East
Anglians call strong beer nog? Z More identifies a couple

(11:01):
of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from the
word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated slang
for head for your head. But before that noggen meant
a small mug or a small drink of spirits. So
perhaps noggin was shorter, was shortened to nog and it

(11:22):
came to refer to the beer inside the mug instead
of the mug itself. And we do that kind of
metonomy with with words today like did you have wine? Oh,
I drank two glasses. You're not saying you literally drank
the glass. The glasses mean the wine inside the glass.
But another idea is that the word nog for strong

(11:42):
beer comes from a Scottish word nug or nugged ale,
which means ale that you heat up by sticking a
hot poker in it, which is funny enough to imagine
in itself, but I can also see how that would
correspond to a drink with strong alcohol alcohol con hint,
because drinks with higher alcohol content were often said to

(12:03):
taste warm or even to burn. M hmm, yeah, this
is this is interesting. It brings to mind the images
of some of these older drinks where you would you
would you would stick the hot, hot poker or some
sort of hot metal into it. I think there's a
scene in the excellent TV series The Nick where you
see some of the characters of getting a drink of

(12:23):
this fashion Okay, so so far we've got the idea
that you start with either a little mug called a
noggin or a type of beer warmed with a hot
poker called a nug and somehow one of these terms
gets poured it over into this East Anglian word nog,
which means strong beer. But how does that actually get
connected to the sweet, milky, eggy drink we are familiar with.

(12:47):
We don't know for sure, but the link in the
chain seems to be alcohol. Because while you can buy
kid friendly nog in the dairy isle these days, everything
I've been reading suggests that early egg nog was boozy.
That was a primary characteristic of what the nog was.
It had a lot of alcohol in it. Yeah, absolutely,
that's That's exactly what I saw in all of my research.

(13:10):
Nobody's talking about egg nog is something that is then spiked.
It is inherently spiked. And Zimmer reports that a Maryland
clergyman named Jonathan Boucher is alleged to have written the
first known reference to eggnog and a poem in seventeen
seventy five, but this poem was not published until about

(13:31):
thirty years later. So we don't know when it was
actually written for sure, but the relevant section of the
poem goes like this, fog DRAMs in the morn or
better still eggnog. This is nog with two g's at
night hot suppings and at mid day grog my palate
can regale. So you see the context here is fully

(13:52):
alcoholic grog refers to a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Uh.
Then there's that line, fog DRAMs in the morn or
better still eggnog. A dram usually refers to a small
drink of whiskey, and according to Miriam Webster, fog DRAMs
are quote DRAMs resorted to on the pretense of their

(14:13):
protecting from the danger of fog. I'm sorry, boss, I
had to have another whiskey before work, or the fog
could have killed me on the way here. All right, Well, yeah,
this is making sense as um as an early morning drink, though,
because you get your your fog protection, you get a
couple of eggs in there. Maybe you know this is

(14:35):
a breakfast that you're drinking down exactly. Um, So Bouche
may have written that in seventies. It's hard to say
for sure, but according to Zimmer, the earliest at rock Solid.
References to eggnog, where we know the date of their publication,
appear in a handful of newspapers in the year seventeen
eighty eight, as you mentioned earlier. Now, one is a

(14:58):
March seventeen eighty eight port in the New Jersey Journal,
which and I love that this is what some newspaper
articles consisted of at the time. Uh. It says a
young man with a cormorant appetite meaning like gluttonous, A
young man with a cormorant appetite voraciously devoured last week
at Connecticut farms, thirty raw eggs, a glass of eggnog,

(15:22):
and another of brandy sling. Yeah, is this what newspapers
were back in the day. Did you have like a
gluttony page for you? Like, what's everybody over eating in
New Jersey? Stop the presses. We've got to get this story,
this hot story about the guy who ate thirty eggs
in there. Okay, so whatever eggnog is at the time,
he had some Another article is from October eight in

(15:46):
the Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia, where a writer was complaining
about an upset stomach and wrote, quote, when wine and
beer punch and eggnog. Meat instantly ensues a quarrel that
there's isdom to that. I think, Yeah, I've only ever
heard the liquor before beer kind of thing. I've never
heard it taken out to four different things with like

(16:07):
punch and eggnog in there. You know, we're looking back
at a at a time when, um, when when drinking
was a little more robust throughout the country. I think, yeah,
uh so anyway, yeah, I love the fact that newspapers
not only used to report on what some guy aided
a form, but also what gave me an upset tummy.

(16:28):
Uh So, it sounds like an alcoholic beverage known as
eggnog was in common parlance in the colonies and the
young United States in the late eighteenth century. But Zimmer
also documents how an early example of eggnog was associated
with Christmas celebration by citing a piece in the Virginia
Chronicle from January sevente which reads as follows. On last

(16:54):
Christmas Eves, several gentlemen melt met at Northampton Courthouse and
spent the evening in earth and festivity. When eggnog was
the principal liquor used by the company. After they had
indulged pretty freely in this beverage, a gentleman in the
company offered a bet that not one of the party
could write four versus ex tempore, which should be rhyme

(17:16):
and sense. Okay, he's like, we're so drunk, I bet
none of you can write four lines of poetry that
will make sense and rhyme. So what did they come
up with? While one guy belts out the following tis
eggnog now, whose golden streams dispense far richer treasures to
the ravished sense. The muse from wine derives a transient glare,

(17:40):
but Eggnogg's drafts afford her solid fare. M hmm, so
move over wine. The muses are no longer interested in
you now they will only be singing to people who
are chugging eggnog. Eggnog doesn't seem to have a personification though,
Like there's no like Sadyer of eggnog, the Dionysus of eggnog.

(18:03):
It's you know, he was before it's time. I think
he would have he would have approved of eggnog, especially
based on these historical references to egg So do we
know exactly what they were putting in eggnog at the time. Well,
there's a book from seventeen called Travels through the States
of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower
Canada during the year six and ninety seven by an

(18:27):
Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld. And this passage
actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing I
think David Wondritch who said that sometimes people from Europe
might encounter eggnog and think, oh what what, you know,
what crimes they're committing against a drinking culture here in
in in the Americas. Uh. And I wonder if there's

(18:50):
a little bit of that kind of raised eyebrow going
on in this passage. But we'll see what you think.
So Weld is writing about a stop at an inn
near Baltimore, Maryland, where he right quote, several travelers had
stopped at the same house that I did the first
night I was on the road, and we all breakfasted
together preparatory to setting out the next morning. The American travelers,

(19:11):
before they pursued their journey, took a hearty draft each
according to custom of eggnog, a mixture composed of new milk, eggs, rum,
and sugar beat up together. So eggnog it should be heavy, sweet,
exploding with alcohol, drunk in large quantities in the morning
before setting out on a long journey. Yeah, this is

(19:35):
I mean it really it forces you to rethink eggnog
because I think a lot of people are probably like
like me, you grew up exposed to again, the grocery
store eggnog, and there's this kind of sense that eggnog
is this drink for everybody. Eggnoggs this drink for kids.
And as you get older, and then you're perhaps in
a situation where you can have the eggnog with something

(19:57):
added to it, eggnog plus uh if you like. But
this that that the the historical truth of eggnog is no,
this is the thing that the really drunken adults are
having sometimes first thing in the morning. Also regarding famous
eggnog recipes from the early days of of the United States,

(20:19):
there is a famous recipe for eggnog that is alleged
to come from George Washington's kitchen papers. You'll find this
if you google George Washington's Eggnog. I've seen some serious
doubt cast upon its origins, like whether it was actually
Washington's but According to the Farmer's Almanac, this famous recipe
goes as follows. It's one court cream, one quart milk,

(20:43):
one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, half a pint
rye whiskey, half a pint Jamaica rum, and a quarter
pint sherry. And then you mix the liquor, separate the
yolks and the whites of twelve eggs, add sugar to
the beaten yolks. Mix well. Then you add milk and cream,
slowly beating. Beat the whites of the eggs until stiff

(21:05):
peaks form, then fold slowly into the mixture. Then you
let it sit in a cool place for several days.
Then quote taste frequently. Uh. And I could be wrong,
but I believe this is the recipe that our colleague,
our colleague Alex Williams uses when he makes his famous
eggnog for for for all of our coworkers. Yes, it

(21:26):
definitely is. This is This is definitely the recipe he
would use, and it it is quite delightful. But yeah,
I encountered the same thing. Looking at the uh, the
actual history of this, there's some doubt as to whether
George Washington actually serve this um and then there are
some accounts that say, well, it looks like maybe there's
evidence that that eggnog was served at Mount Vernon, But

(21:49):
as far as the precise recipe, I don't know that
there's a lot of data to back that up. Yeah,
though we will have we will touch on at least
one former US Press resident who did have a recipe
for eggnog and did serve it and drink it. All right,
all this being said, before we proceed with agnog, I
think we can at least consider the possibility of predecessors that, yes,

(22:14):
even if eggnog is something that emerges in North America,
there at least things not unlike eggnog that one can encounter,
say in at least late medieval and post medieval Europe. Oh, yes,
some gorgeous textures to imagine. Yeah, so let's go back
to the late Middle Ages and drink some hard milk.

(22:35):
So European holiday traditions, which of course inform holiday traditions
and Colonial American beyond, are a mix of Christian traditions,
more ancient traditions, and a great deal of regional variability.
I was, in fact, just researching the the the Hooden
or Odden Horse of Kent for the Monster Facts series,
and I think that's a great example of this. Uh.

(22:58):
It brings to mind various stum street wandering traditions as
well as caroling and was sailing. Wassail, of course, is
a door to door ritualistic and communal hot drink. The
typically contained mold cider ale or wine and spices. But
then there is the tradition of the posett the poset. Yes,

(23:21):
the Smithsonian Magazine website has a has a nice article
about this title Past the Poset colon the Medieval Eggnog
by Lisa Brahman, and according to this article, it apparently
dates back to late medieval Europe, and it looks like
some of the examples come to us from the post
medieval world and beyond. Anyway, the the poset itself is

(23:42):
a drinking vessel, as Brahman points out, and you see
mention of it even in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which Lady
Macbeth poisons the posets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters.
Oh I forgot about that. I had as well. When um,
when the author here brings it up, I'm like, oh, yeah,
I do remember that line vaguely, but you encounter so

(24:03):
many archaic words if you're reading or performing Shakespeare that
you can't stop to wonder overall of them. It's enough
to be like, okay, this this means drinking vessel. Okay,
what's the next strange word that that doesn't quite register
for me? Let me translate that one in my head.
But this is a If you you can actually look
up examples of this vessel online the past, this po

(24:24):
s s et and you'll find that some of the
main examples of this it looks curiously like an ornate
teapot with handles on both sides, a wide lidded aperture
at the top, with a with a with a lid
on top, and the stem for it, you know, like
the like a t kettle. It feeds from the bottom

(24:44):
of the vessel rather than from the middle or the
top of the vessel. The reason for this design, according
to Brayman, is that you can drink directly from the
stem to get at the liquid contents of the of
the of the liquid it contains. But also you can
take the lid off the top and go at the
top of it with a spoon, because basically you're gonna

(25:07):
have a mixture of thing. You're gonna have a fluid
beneath and kind of a chunky, um, chunky, creamy, perhaps
cheesy layer at the top. So this is like, it's
like a curdled milk drink that has that has cheesy,
floaty solid bits on the top you want to get

(25:27):
with a spoon. Yes. Um. The way that the Brayman
describes it is quote both a drink and a dessert
with a layer of thick sweet gruel floating above the liquid. Okay,
so okay. On one hand, I realized that could potentially
be interpreted as gross, But on the other hand, I
think it's not that different from a lot of sort

(25:49):
of fropthy dessert things we have today. I think about
certain milkshakes, certain smoothies, uh, certainly the especially the older
school cappuccinos where the foam cap top was maybe a
little firmer and you might have to go at that
with a spoon as opposed to drinking it. So I
kind of reject the idea that that this uh, you know,

(26:10):
potential hygiene issues aside of of late medieval ages. I
don't think this is necessarily that gross of an idea
that you could have some sort of like a thick
portion on the top of your beverage that requires a spoon.
It's just like a little different to imagine this bizarre
container for its um consumption. Uh. Nowadays, I do want

(26:31):
to point out we do have things like the spoon straw,
which is like a plastic usually like a plastic straw
and spoon combined so that you can do both. They
did not have this technology in the late medieval period
to my knowledge. Therefore they had to use a posset. Well,
you know, it is the same principle as a straw,
which I don't find unusual. But I have to say
it is funny to imagine somebody like drinking out of

(26:53):
the stem of a tea kettle. Yeah. Yeah, it does
seem like you might burn your mouth with this. It's
recorded recipes. Uh, you know, many of these came came later.
I believe they called if you're going to fill the pacet,
it would call for a great deal of egg and cream.
They might also call for beer, sugar, and also thickening

(27:13):
agents such as bread, biscuits, oatmeal, and almond paste. In
some cases, the upper portions are said to take on
a cheese equality, which actually brings to mind modern cheese
milk tea drinks, which are quite delightful if if you
haven't had one, I know this is something that can
be kind of hard to imagine. Why should my milk
tea taste like cheese? Well, it's it's not. It's not

(27:36):
what you're imagining. If you're imagining something that that turns
your stomach. It's not like cheddar cheese on the top
of your tea. It's something sweetier and creamier, but with
that that slight cheesy twist to it, not like provolone
right right now. I should also mention there there are
more contemporary posset dishes, such as the oftensive recipes for

(27:59):
something called an than paset, but this seems somewhat more
refined compared to what is described here. This is not
something you drink out of a strange tea kettle. It's
something you spoon out of a dish. But is it eggnog? Well,
in many ways, if not most ways, no, But it
also sounds like the sort of thing that if you
were a time traveler from an eggnog having culture and

(28:24):
you went back to the late medieval ages and you're like,
where's my egg nog and people are like, what are
you talking about? You might discover the pacet and be like, oh,
well this will work, this will do. Now my holiday
is complete. Yeah, it's a liquid e egg and milk
or egg and cream type thing, right. And I think
it's not crazy to imagine that this sort of precedent

(28:46):
for this sort of drink and the sort of taste
sensations that it brings about, that this could feed into
the very American traditions that would, according to Thomas, bring
about the American eggnog. So I assume after we get
out of this, uh, this early period where where mentions
are scarce and don't really explain much about eggnog except

(29:07):
like the Irish guy who's clearly not familiar with it,
we we get into a period where there is more
extensive writing on eggnog, maybe like in actual cookery manuals. Yeah. Yeah,
there's a lot more material once you reach a certain point. Uh.
And Wonder has a whole chapter on egg drinks in
his book I Vibe Um. As he writes it, their

(29:28):
quote neither punches nor part of the lineage of cocktails.
And this is also somewhat how Jerry Thomas and the
people of his day would have classified them. One of
the things that really amazed me about all this, though,
is that the Wandridge points out that egg drinks were
once far more common and kind of a daily affair,
but that few survive today. Uh. This kind of comes

(29:50):
back to your example earlier about eggnog for breakfast, why
not perfect, keep the fog away, etcetera. Uh Now, now
I should point out this is the two thousand seven books,
so I'm not sure if we've seen anything in the
way of a resurgence of egg drinks. It might be
the case, though, you know, given the spirit of cocktail
making and it's tend to to re explore older fashions

(30:10):
and even remake them with modern twists, I don't feel
like it's tremendously uncommon to find at least a single
egg drink on a fancy cocktail menu, though to be sure,
you probably won't find them on just random restaurant cocktail menus.
Like I don't know if Chili's offers an egg drink.
I'm trying to think, what are the standard egg drinks
other Well, I guess they're like um drinks I don't

(30:33):
usually get, but like, are there like sours and phizzes
and stuff that have that have egg whites in them. Yeah,
I Wondering points out that the major survivors include the
nineteenth century Tom and Jerry drink. This would be uh
not getting into the proportions, but it's like sugar, eggs rum, cinnamon, clothes,
all spice. There's the sherry flip, which is basically egg,

(30:54):
sugar and sherry, and he discusses his elsewhere in the book.
But of course there's the Ramos gin Is, which is
pretty famous New Orleans drink that contains gin, simple syrup,
lemon juice, lime juice, egg white, heavy cream, orange flower
water in club soda. It's one that famously requires a
great deal of shaking. Um, you may you may receive

(31:14):
a dirty look from the bartender when you order it
because of all the shaking it's going to require. Sometimes
they were to pass it off to another bartender to
continue shake shaking it. But it is also a delightful drink.
But yeah it. Wonderage points out though that that that
even though we only have so many egg drinks that
kind of survived, there was this time where where egg

(31:36):
based drinks, egg egg based alcoholic drinks were consumed on
pretty much a daily basis, and we're as popular as
eggnog drinks are during the holiday year round. So just imagine,
imagine a world in which eggnog is stocked at the
grocery store year round to meet people's demand for it,

(31:58):
and everybody's having it boozed up. Not that they bought
it at the grocery store, they made it, right, You
get my point. That's that sounds like a magical time,
a very rich, rich time. Yeah, But as Paul Clark
points out in the Imbibe magazine article, elements egg cocktails,
changing tastes and salmonella scares pretty much chased raw eggs

(32:22):
out of the bar. And this, this would be kind
of this would be the reason that only so many
egg drinks kind of survived this period of time in which,
on one hand, yet changing taste. You can imagine, perhaps
you know, there are new fads and cocktails, new ingredients
are more readily available for cocktails, and then there's this
whole issue of salmonella. Salmonella concerns, of course, remain relevant

(32:45):
to this day, and we'll come back to those in
just a few minutes. Now. Wonder it also points out
there was a great deal variation when it came to
egg nog recipes, which I imagine is going to be
the case with any popular drink, even if the recipe
isn't secret. Uh. See the Invention episode we did about
the my Tie for examples of this. On both counts.
If the recipe is secret, people are going to try
and recreate it. And even if the secret is if

(33:08):
if there's no secret, if the recipe is well known,
you're gonna end up having deviations anyway. For instance, anywhere
you go today the my Tai recipe, there's no telling
what a restaurant will actually serve you if you order
my Tai, even though um, the the the original recipe
is very well known at this point, or it's it's
very easily obtained if you have a desire to seek

(33:29):
it out. And uh, but these regional differences in egg nog,
this would this would really make people emotional. Wondrid Show
points that this account where there's a judge who encountered
egg nog and an inn and it didn't have whiskey
enough in it, and therefore there was this huge altercation.
Oh yeah, I mean again, going back to stories about ends,

(33:51):
you don't say what time of day this is, but
this eggnog might have been his morning eggnog, which sets
the tone for the entire day. It's like, you know,
if you don't get your coffee right in the morning,
that's bad news. Yeah. If I don't get my my
heavily alcoholic egg nog in the morning, I'm just no,
I'm no good now. Sometimes those regional differences, though, are
going to be entirely based on what is available to you.

(34:12):
And a great example of this is the Texian version
of eggnog includes the recipe in the book It is
um it stems. It stems from General Thomas Green of
the Army of the Texas Republic from eighteen forty three.
The recipe serves about a hundred and sixty. It calls
for seven gallons of mescal, seven gallons of donkey milk,

(34:36):
thirty dozen eggs, and a large loaf of sugar. I
love that sugar used to come in loaves. Yeah, if
you're making egg nog for hundred and sixty and a
number of these recipes do call for large uh vats
of eggnog, but this this is quite a lot. I
mean seven gallons of mescal, seven gallons of donkey milk.

(34:57):
I've never tasted donkey milk. I don't even know what
that would be like. Again to the two thousand seven book,
but one Bridge mentioned that donkey milk was becoming popular
at the time in Europe due to um this supposedly
it had some health advantages to it. I don't know
if that's true. I don't know if it's still popular
as an alternative milk. I don't think I've seen it
in myself in health food stores. But then again, I'm

(35:20):
not really in the market for donkey milk anyway. What
one writch roughly translates the recipe for modern drinkers in
that book. Um. He of course says you can use
cow milk instead of donkey milk, and he also recommends
grating a little chocolate on top. Mm hmm. So. Jerry
Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and one Rich

(35:42):
includes recipes for three of them in his book. Roughly speaking,
these are the contents of of these three that he shares.
There's Baltimore eggnog, eggs sugar, nutmeg, brandy or rum wine,
egg whites and milk. There's eggnog individual which calls for sugar,
cold water, egg kognac, Santa Cruz, rum, and milk. And

(36:03):
then there's General Harrison zag nog. This this is ninth
American President William Henry Harrison, and this was said to
be one of his favorites. Um it called for eggs, sugar,
hard cider, and lumps of ice. Important to note here
that cider drinking was part of his brand. His whole
image that he tried to put out was like, I

(36:24):
I'm I'm not really at home in this whole Washington environment.
I just want to sit on the porch and drink
some hard cider. Won't you have some of my hard
cider based eggnog and vote for me? Yeah? That was
him saying like, I'm just a you know, a hard
working frontiersman. I'm not one of these elites. Yeah, but
I don't know. I mean, I I appreciate hard cider,

(36:47):
but this sounds horrific. I don't think I would I
would want any part of this, So General Harrison, no,
thank you. General Harrison also died about some like thirty
days into his first presidential term. Uh yeah, he's the
one who he didn't really make it very far. And
their speculation about why he died, but one of them
is that he may have succumbed to the fact that

(37:10):
um that the water supply at the White House at
the time was heavily contaminated with raw sewage. Huh interesting.
I had a whole tangent for this episode about twelve
years President Zachary Taylor, who fell ill with a fatal
illness on July eighteen fifty after a d c DC
fundraiser uh that he attended where he quote drank freely

(37:33):
of iced water and chilled milk. According to U biographer
kay Jack Bauer in the book Zachary Taylor, Soldier, Planters,
Statesman of the Old Southwest. UM, So i've i've I've
seen this described as copious amounts of cherries and iced milk.
Apparently he he preferred drinking chilled milk. That was his thing.

(37:54):
That was the hardest drink that Zachary Taylor was known
to imbibe himself. But I cut most of this out
because he wasn't drinking um, as far as I can tell,
a cherry chilled milk concoction. It was just chilled milk
and then also a lot of cherries and probably plenty
of raw sewage. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Is

(38:21):
it time for salmonella? Oh yeah, that's a great transition,
so eggs and salmonella. Salmonella remains probably the main reason
people have reservations about raw egg based food and drinks today. Uh.
Salmonella is a genus of bacteria named not after salmon
the fish, but after an American veterinarian named Daniel Elmer

(38:46):
Salmon that it was not discovered by him. It was
named after him basically because a species of Salmonella was
discovered by an assistant in a lab who worked for Salmon.
The assistants name was Theobald Smith, but of course the
boss gets all the glory. Some zero types of salmonella

(39:07):
are responsible for really serious and historically significant diseases such
as typhoid fever, but multiple types of salmonella will result
in infections of the intestinal tract. So salmonilla infection or
salmon ellosis, is one of the most common food born illnesses,
often characterized by fever, diarrhea, severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting,

(39:30):
and headache. And because salmonilla is often transmitted through the
fecal oral route, the risk of contracting it is higher
when people don't have access to clean drinking water and
effective sewage disposal. Though, salmon Ala can also be transmitted
between animals and humans, so animal vectors, such as eggs

(39:51):
from infected chickens, can be a major source of salmon
ellosis in humans as well. Now, on the other hand,
one thing to remember is that most eggs are fine.
Most eggs are not infected with salmonilla. I don't know
what the exact proportion is, but one figure I saw
kicking around from the two thousands was a C d

(40:12):
C estimate that roughly one in every twenty thousand chicken
eggs in the United States was contaminated. That number may
be different today. If so, it's probably somewhat lower than that.
But uh, you know, I'm not saying you should go
about eating raw eggs. There is definitely risk there, but
also like, the odds are pretty low that any given

(40:33):
egg is going to make you sick. Also, eggs are
fine if you cook them to the proper temperature for
the proper time. A hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit will
kill just about anything instantly. Also, you know, even lower
temperatures if held for a sufficient amount of time will
be enough to UH, to basically sterilize eggs. This is,

(40:54):
you can look up charts on the amount of time
eggs need to spend at a certain temperature in order
to make them safe. However, eggnog is traditionally not made
with eggs that are cooked at all, but rather with
raw ones. So is there any risk? Well, yes, obviously
if you are just drinking raw eggs straight up, there

(41:16):
is some risk of salmonella infection. UH. One example of this,
I mean it happens all the time, but one example,
one case study I dug up with an interesting secondary finding.
This is a study published in The Lancet in nineteen
seventy five by Steer at All called person to person
spread of Salmonella typha murrium after a after a hospital

(41:40):
common source outbreak. So the abstract reads in September nineteen
seventy three, diarrhea caused by Salmonella typhemurrium developed in thirty
two people in a main hospital. Both epidemiological and microbiological
evidence indicated that raw egg beaten in milk for eggnog
was responsible for the infection. However, six patients and eight

(42:04):
employees had not had eggnog and their illness developed after
the source of infection had been recognized and removed. Most
of these people had had direct contact with an infected
patient and presumably acquired the infection by person to person spread.
It's concluded that person to person spread of salmonella typhon

(42:24):
miriam can occur in hospitals and canby a hazard to
patients and staff. So initially a bunch of people in
a hospital got salmonella from drinking eggnog, but then those
people gave secondary infections to others who didn't even touch
the knog. Also, I wanted to share another medical journal
article I found just because I thought it was very weird.

(42:46):
This is called Eyelid Abscess in an Eggnog Drinker by
Marcus and Wolverson, published in the British Medical Journal nine nine.
Short story is a seventy two year old man showed
up the hospital in England with a huge abscess swelling
on his left upper eyelid, which they eventually determined had

(43:07):
spread to an infection of the bone in his forehead
the area the bone above where his eye was so
he was put under general anesthesia and the abscess was drained.
They did a culture of the plus and it revealed
the presence of a type of salmonella. They eventually did
another procedure to take care of the swelling in the

(43:27):
bones of the face, and he eventually made a full recovery.
The man had no gastro intestinal symptoms, and the authors
say that there had been recent cases of salmonella infection
related to eggs, So they asked him about his diet,
and here I'm going to read from the case report.
His diet consisted of West Indian and European food, but

(43:49):
he said that he cooked all eggs well. When he
was seen in the outpatient department, he was specifically asked
if he drank eggnog, and he then admitted drinking a frequently,
using a recipe of raw eggs, brandy, sugar, milk, and
vanilla essence. Now, the authors say they could find no
previous evidence of this particular type of salmonella causing an

(44:12):
eyelid abscess, but that there are other known cases of
this bacterial infection uh spreading from a gut infection originally
to a secondary infection elsewhere in the body, such as
in the bones, especially the long bones, especially in patients
with underlying medical conditions, and in patients over seventy years

(44:33):
of age. Uh. And finally, the author's right quote. From
nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty six, the proportion of
salmonella infections caused by salmonella and then they're talking about
a specific type here, Salmonella in pteroditis rose from eleven
percent to twenty eight percent. This rise was due mainly
to a rise in phage type four infections. Transmission of

(44:56):
this phage type has been increasingly associated with poultry, and
it is now known to be transmitted in eggs. Egg
Borne Salmonilla in pteroditis is destroyed by thorough cooking the
raw egg, and the eggnog may have been the vehicle
of infection. Unless specifically asked for, a history of eggnog
drinking may not emerge on dietary questioning. But okay, now,

(45:22):
I'm sure a lot of people out there wondering, Wait
a minute, Okay, obviously, you know you mix up a
bunch of raw eggs and you just drink that, that
definitely is putting you at risk. But if you put
alcohol in the eggnog, surely that would be safe. Right?
Doesn't alcohol kill germs? Yeah? And we're talking a lot

(45:43):
of alcohol, and some of these recipes now frustrating Lee.
I have not been able to put together a very
clear answer on the exact relationship between alcohol content and
raw egg safety. Instead, I've sort of assembled some different
inflicting data points. But I'll share a few of the
results I came across. So one thing I found is

(46:06):
a study in the International Journal of Food Microbiology published
in nineteen nine called survival of pathogenic micro organisms in
an eggnog like product containing seven percent ethanol. This is
by not Erman's at all, so this is a lab test.
They say, let's make some boozy eggnog and uh directly
inject pathogenic micro organisms in there and see what happens.

(46:30):
So they say, a liquor consisting of whole egg sacros
meaning sugar and ethanol of seven was artificially contaminated with
Salmonella in pteroditis, Salmonilia, typha, miriam, Staphylococcus aureus, three different
strains Basilus serious, and Listeria. And they say after three

(46:56):
weeks of incubation at twenty two degrees celsius, twenty two
degrees celsius is about seventy one degrees fahrenheit. Room temperature,
the numbers of Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus and uh end of
the listeria species they use decreased by more than three
log based tin units and UH, if I understand correctly,

(47:16):
I believe that's a ninety nine point nine percent reduction
in the in the number of bacteria units. There they
say under such conditions, however, the total number of micro
organisms increased three log ten units. Then they say at
four degrees celsius, So I think this would be simulating
refrigerator temperatures. The decrease of pathogenic microorganisms was much slower,

(47:39):
and a decrease of three log based ten units was
observed only after seven weeks of incubation. So this study
finds eggnog without alcohol incubated at room temperature. Yeah, that's
you allow populations of salmonilla and staff to explode. But
in this study, the presence of seven percent straight ethanol
significantly reduced the amount of Salmonella staff in listeria over

(48:03):
the course of three weeks at room temperature and over
the course of seven weeks at fridge temperature. However, other
micro organisms can grow. I'm pretty sure this is a
recipe for eggnog that they used is the doctor cushion
catheter r resopute for eggnog with all of these added diseases.
Mm hmm. You can just imagine Christopher Lee drooling over

(48:25):
it while the Stanton Twins dance. But the the amount
of alcohol clearly matters. One highly cited informal experiment. This
was not published in a scientific journal as far as
I can tell, but it was done and reported on
by NPR for Science Friday. It was done in the
late two thousands by microbiologists at the at Rockefeller University

(48:49):
named Vince Fischetti and Raymond Shuck and it was covered
on Science Friday. And apparently these researchers used a recipe
that the staff at the Universe City would make every year,
which originally traced back to the great American microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield.
So this is her original eggnog recipe. She had worked

(49:09):
at Rockfeller University decades earlier. Apparent they're still making her
eggnog years after she passed away. Uh. And the recipe
includes raw eggs but also cream, sugar and a lot
of hard liquor. Uh. The liquors in this version are
bourbon and rum NPR reported that the alcohol concentration of
the final drink was about and the way they would

(49:33):
do it is every year they'd make it before Thanksgiving
and then enjoy it around Christmas time. So it had
an incubation incubation period in the refrigerator of about six weeks.
So for this experiment, the researchers made their usual nog,
but they deliberately spiked it once again with salmonilla. That
just you can watch a video of this. They're just
injecting this orange juice into the eggs. It's disgusting. Um.

(49:58):
They say. They put in the amount of salmonella you
would expect from including about somewhere between one and ten
contaminated eggs, and then they took samples at various stages
of preparation and incubation to see what grew over the
course of the next three weeks. So egg plus salmonella
with no alcohol, that's just it formed a solid mat

(50:22):
of salmon. Just huge boom, millions of bacteria. Disgusting. You
can need your spoon in egg plus salmonella plus alcohol
with the sample taken immediately after mixing give you a
modest reduction, but still plenty of salmonella growth. This would
still absolutely make you sick. Egg plus salmonella plus alcohol,

(50:45):
But one day after mixing, still plenty of salmonella, but
less than the one taken right after mixing. One week
later there was noticeably less bacterial growth, but they said,
still probably enough to make you sick. But then the
sample from three weeks later there's nothing, no bacterial growth
at all. So somewhere between one week and three weeks

(51:09):
this batch went from biohazard to presumably safe. HM though
I noticed that the Science Friday report made a joke
about like the researchers themselves are joking about this. They said,
you know, we we could really commit to our result
and just drink it, but maybe maybe not, which makes sense, right,

(51:32):
like why risk it? And that kind of spirit comes
through in a lot of the other sources I've seen
talking about whether alcohol will render your eggnog safe, because
it seems clear there's evidence that at least in some cases,
even if you got unlucky enough and got a contaminated egg,
given enough alcohol and enough time, the nog would probably

(51:53):
be safe. But there are a lot of variables here,
and so it seems like a bunch of public Health
and Food say thesources are still cautious. There's still kind
of cag about giving the green light on this, and
they default to saying that if you want to be
sure you're safe, you should use past your ized eggs
from a carton which have been rendered safe by preheating

(52:14):
in the facility where they were packaged. Um or they
also recommend cooking the eggs basically like sources citing experts
at the FDA or the U s d A, say
that you can't always count on alcohol to kill potential
bacterial content of raw eggs, and if you want to
be safe, the eggs should be cooked. You can do
this by like mixing the eggs and milk together and

(52:35):
gently bringing up to a hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit
while stirring to kill any possible bacterial content before you
add the other ingredients. So personally, I don't know exactly
where we are left here. I will say it looks
like some experiments do show that alcohol content will at
least often, maybe not always, but will at least often

(52:57):
neutralize the main bacteria that are worried about, meaning salmonilla,
given enough alcohol and enough time, and I will say
that I also, just speaking for myself, not giving advice
to other people, have personally drunk eggnog made in this
way with raw eggs but with lots of alcohol content,
and personally I felt fine about it. But it also

(53:21):
looks like some experts still have concerns that this might
not always work, and caution that if you want to
make sure you're safe, you should cook your eggs or
you s a pasteurized product. I mean, this is also
enough to make one rethink um eating raw cookie dough
and so forth. Oh yeah, I mean, well, it's true,
I guess of anything with raw eggs in it, like,
there's always some small amount of risk. You know, some

(53:44):
small proportion of eggs out there are going to be infected.
Most eggs are fine, but some are going to have
salmonella in them, So you're always running that risk. And
I guess I guess some of the difficulty comes from
not just whether or not you will accept the risk,
but from not knowing exactly how risky it is. Like
you you can't come up, you don't have a number,

(54:06):
you know, to say like, Okay, I have this percent
chance of getting salmonella if I do this. Instead, you
just have a vague sense that I have some small
chance and I don't know exactly what that chance is.
But in a way, that's the that's the holiday season.
It's about it's about uh thinking about your your chances
of survival, uh winter festivity that is supposed to get

(54:30):
you through the darkest portion of the year and hopefully
see about the resurrection of the living world. That's quite
beautifully put. But on the other hand, I'll just say, like,
you know, if if you're not sure, yeah, just cook
your eggs or just use the past your eyes thing.
I mean, that's fine. Now. Last year, un stuff to
blow your mind. We did an entire episode looking at
the major award leg lamp from a Christmas Story, the

(54:55):
nine eighties holiday classic film, and you know, looking at
this leg shaped lamp and finding uh predecessors to this
in the ancient world. In a similar way, I would
like to at the close of this episode on Eggnog
consider holiday film Christmas Vacation, which of course started a

(55:19):
great cast Chevy Chase, Beverly de Angelo, Randy Quaid, among others. Um.
But there are at least a couple of key scenes
in this movie in which the Griswold family drinks eggnog
from glass goblets made in the likeness of the Wally
World moose. Uh. These are you can actually buy these now,
this is an actual product, but in the movie they're

(55:41):
these these little glass goblets and they have big glass
moose antlers on either side, and there's a big droopy
moose snout on the front. You hold it by the
ear and you sip your eggnog that way or you
gulp it as as happens to be the case in
some of the scenes. I imagine the moon face has
to be facing out or else the snout would sort

(56:03):
of prevent you from from getting it to your lips. Yeah. Yeah,
you'd have to hold the glass in just the right way.
It's a ceremonial vessel. And I started looking around was thinking,
I don't know, I don't know if there's going to
be something in the ancient world that matches up with this.
But luckily, once more eighties holiday movie prop design is
one in line with the manufacture of artifacts in the

(56:24):
ancient world. I would like to discuss the the right on.
This is generally spelled r h y t o N
and it is a style of head cup that appears
in various forms throughout the ancient world, according to Mara
Abd el Maguad el Kadi in Forms and functions of
right ons in Ptolemaic Egypt. According to this author, they

(56:48):
were likely Persian in origin, and we're particularly popular during
the Akamand dynasty of fifty through three thirty PC. You
can look up images of the right on in the
various aversion of the right on that appear in different
times and different cultures. One can roughly compare these two
a drinking horn like a you know, the hollowed horn

(57:09):
of of a beast, but the design and function here
is a little more involved. So imagine a drinking horn
in which the slender part of the horn, the tapering
part of the horn is in the likeness of an
animal's head, or in the like the front half of
an animal. M m. And we don't have time on
this in this episode. Really dig into the variation and

(57:30):
the different cultural takes in this episode. But again, this
would have been a realistic drinking vessel. This would not
be something you would bust out, I would imagine for
your just everyday consumption. This would be for ceremonial drinking.
And there are essentially two types of right on. In
one form, you drink from the slender part of the

(57:50):
right on, holding it above one's head or roughly, you know,
above one's head, or at least parallel with one's head,
by either twin handles on the side, or from some
other kind of of handle that's a fixed to the object,
or even from sort of the the horn itself. In
other forms, one drinks from the wide portion of the

(58:10):
right on, so the whole thing is more like a
traditional goblet, except many of these designs would require you know,
gripping by the horns or by the or the antlers
that are on it. If they're antlers on it, and
you might not be able to set it down, it
may not might not have a bottom to it. Wow,
well that that that almost suggests a certain way to drink. Yeah,

(58:34):
and again this would be highly ritual, So it's it's
not about setting your drink aside and then doing other things.
You're not gonna do any paperwork. This is probably part
of some ritual I don't know. You can easily imagine
some sort of warriors feast, etcetera. Right, you can't drink
it while you're podcasting. It's maybe to drink from while
people stand around you chanting drink right Uh. So there

(58:56):
are various beautiful examples of the right on, but the
one that really brought to my mind the Wally World
mug is the Stag's head right on, dating to four
b c E. This is a silver artifact that actually
made headlines just last year due to its three point
five million dollar appraisal value and its presence among stolen

(59:17):
antiquities that were found in the possession of billionaire Michael Steinhardt.
Uh you can look up particles on that again from
just last year. The item was apparently alluded from a
museum in Turkey originally, but I'm unsure exactly when the
looting occurred other than sometime during the twentieth century during
a time of unrest, which that only narrows it down

(59:39):
so much concerning the twentieth century, though it does seem
to be of ancient Greek manufacturer somewhere in the region
of the Black Sea, probably from the fifth century b C.
And with this one, you'd apparently drink from the stag's
lower lip while holding it aloft, though not by the
antlers um as is visible in many photo is of

(01:00:00):
this particular artifact. There's this curved handle behind the neck. Oh,
I see it. Yeah, So the question remains, is the
Wally World mug a right on? It's not no, it's yes.
It's first of all, it's not horn shaped. It also
doesn't you don't drink from the moose's lips, though that
alone wouldn't disqualify it from being a right on, as

(01:00:22):
we previously noted, though, I've included a picture for for you, Joe,
of a right on that would involve you drinking from
the wide portion as opposed to the beast lips. You
can sort of see mm hmm. So this one would
be very much a situation where you have this kind
of like I don't know, bronze or golden chalice, and
you wouldn't be able to set it down because instead

(01:00:44):
of having a flat surface, flat bottom on the bottom
of your goblet, there is like the head of a
ram down there. Yeah, so you have to lay it
on its side, I guess, in which case you would
either spill what you were drinking or you would have
to have consumed it all. Once again, the medium is
the message here. This This is technology that shows that

(01:01:05):
by necessity shows you a way to use it. Yeah, However,
I will say the Wally World mug is the likeness
of a moose head. It is the likeness of an
animal's head. It also is a ceremonial drinking vessel. They're
clearly the Grizzwolds are not drinking out of these year round.
They're busting them out for the holidays. And just as
some of these artifacts, such as the stag, were decorated

(01:01:28):
with warrior images and images of battle, and we can
imagine that the ceremonies they involved probably aligned with some
sort of warrior ethos. We do see Clark Griswold drinking
copious amounts of nod while working cousin Eddie up for violence.
So curiously I had to go back. I was imagining this,
remembering this scene incorrectly, the scene where Clark Griswold is

(01:01:49):
throwing back a whole bunch of egg nog and talking
about how he wishes somebody would kidnap his boss. He's
curiously not drinking from one of the moose goblets in
this scene. Oh so, I don't know, I don't know
what the reason for that is. You think you'd want
him drinking out of the moose. Maybe it's just because
you it's harder to to to hold. I don't know.
Maybe it's to show in a subtle way that Clark

(01:02:11):
is actually coldly calculating in the scene and he's he's
not as drunk as it would suggest. Yeah, that's a
whole whole topic for another time, trying to figure out
Clark Griswold. How do we feel about Clark Clark Griswold,
about his his motivations and his desires. In Christmas Vacation,
Clark is neutral, evil, cousin cousin Randy Quaid, I'd say

(01:02:37):
chaotic neutral, Yeah, I think so. Alright, So again, not
really a right on in Christmas Vacation, But I think
we might well imagine a scene from an alternate dimension
in which, uh, there's a scene in Christmas Vacation in
which Clark Griswold holds aloft the Mighty Wally the moose
right on. Uh this big glass moose head. Perhaps it's

(01:03:00):
silver in this scenario, I think silver moose head. Perhaps
you grip it by the antlers, and he's allowing cousin
Eddie to then drink nourishing nod from the lips of
the moose before he sends him out into glorious battle
against the enemies of Christmas. All right, that's all I have.

(01:03:22):
God bless us everyone. I will say also, I fortunately
finished my egg nog before we got to the draining
of abscesses. So hopefully that calibrates the podcast episode for
anyone out there who's like, oh, well, Rob's having an
egg nog. I should have an egg nog for this
listening experience. I hope that you two were finished before
the abscesses were drained. Why are you saying that, Rob?

(01:03:44):
Are you saying that? Otherwise it would suggest the mental
image that your glass of creamy mixture is what's out
coming out of the abscess Yes, that it is a
goblet of holiday pus which you might be drinking from
the glass of a moose, which doesn't help, or from
the lips of a moose. Right on, I guess Mary

(01:04:05):
Christmas everybody, all right, Yeah, we're gonna go and close
it out here, but we'd love to hear from everyone
out there if you have. I mean a lot of
people out there are going to have some sort of
holiday tradition involving some manner of egg nog. We didn't
really have time to get into all the variations, but
I know there's some. Uh this I think I've had
like a Puerto Rican variation of egg nog before that

(01:04:26):
was quite delightful. Uh, there's so many different regional variations,
family variations. Please right in. We'd love to hear your
take on all of us. In the meantime, we'll remind
you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science
podcast with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On
Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact.
On Monday's we do a listener mail episode. Out on Fridays,

(01:04:47):
we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks to
our audio producer, Max Williams. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff

(01:05:16):
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
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