Imbibe!

by David Wondrich

  CHAPTER 5

  A HANDFUL OF EGG DRINKS

  I have given what were generally known as “egg drinks” a little section of their own, as they are neither Punches nor part of the lineage of the Cocktail. In segregating them, I am mirroring their place in the psyche of the Jerry Thomas-age drinker. Formerly a major part of day-to-day drinking, by the middle of the nineteenth century drinks made with eggs had seen their role greatly diminished. There were exceptions. Some Fizzes used eggs, or at least parts of them. There was a Flip of sorts, that took the mighty quaff of Colonial days—when Flips were made from quarts of ale and gills of strong rum, thickened with eggs and sugar and poured back and forth from pitcher to pitcher—and shrank it to something that would fit in a Cocktail glass (to make one, shake up an egg with a wineglass of liquor or fortified wine of your choice, a splash of syrup, and plenty of ice; strain and grate nutmeg over the top). And there was the Tom & Jerry, the cold-weather favorite that carried the egg drink’s banner into the twentieth century, if not always at full height. But the only time that egg drinks really recaptured their former importance was on Christmas and New Year’s Day, when they were mandatory.

  EGG NOGG

  “Dec 25—Cloudy & thawy—very muddy—Christmas day—good many drunken ones around town & some few arrests for drunk & disorderly—got up 12—read paper—went down to Charley Ockel’s [saloon] & got some egg-nog.” Thus did Alf Doten, then living in Virginia City, Nevada, begin his Christmas in 1866. But that’s how everyone began their Christmas, if they could afford it and knew where to get their hands on some eggs (in the days before 7-Eleven, not a given) and weren’t infected with temperance principles. The very idea of Christmas or New Year’s Day without the stuff . . . It just wouldn’t be a holiday.

  When Jerry Thomas wrote in 1862 that Egg Nogg “is a beverage of American origin, but it has a popularity that is cosmopolitan,” he was not wrong; if early European travelers to the United States viewed it as one of the novelties Americans were inflicting on the art of drinking, by the 1860s it was a drink of universal, if strictly seasonal, popularity (when Thomas added that in the North “it is a favorite of all seasons,” he was certainly overstating the case). It was popular enough to have spawned numerous variants, most of them sharing the characteristic that Doten recorded on Christmas Day 1871: “Egg nog is deceiptful.” In fact, that’s what people always liked about it, as can be seen in the earliest account of the drink I know of, in an article printed in the Pittsburg Gazette in 1801 describing the “Late, Mad Circuit of Judge Brackenridge through Washington County,” in the course of which this distinctly unsober judge finds himself at a country inn. “He ordered egg nogg to be made; upon tasting it he swore and damned so horribly that the whole family were terrified at his profaneness and all this merely because the egg nogg had not whiskey enough in it.” (Using whiskey in the Egg Nogg was strictly a backwoods practice; swells and epicures preferred brandy and rum, or fortified wines in theirs. But any port in a storm, as the saying goes—in validation of which, there’s even a mezcal Egg Nogg on record, made by Texan prisoners in Mexico, back in the Lone Star days. One shudders.)

  Of Thomas’s six Egg Noggs, I have included the three best, one for a largish group and two for individual drinks.

  BALTIMORE EGG NOGG

  I’m not sure if I completely agree with Thomas that “Egg Nogg made in this manner is digestible, and will not cause headache,” or that “it makes an excellent drink for debilitated persons, and a nourishing diet for consumptives,” but I will say that it is thoroughly delicious.

  (FOR A PARTY OF FIFTEEN.)

  Take the yellow of sixteen eggs and twelve table-spoonfuls of pulverized loaf-sugar [3-4 oz superfine sugar], and beat them to the consistency of cream; to this add two-thirds of a nutmeg grated, and beat well together; then mix in half a pint of good brandy or Jamaica rum, and two wine-glasses [4 oz] of Madeira wine. Have ready the whites of the eggs, beaten to a stiff froth, and beat them into the above-described mixture. When this is all done, stir in six pints of good rich milk. There is no heat used.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: The 1887 edition of Thomas’s book suggests, correctly, that 10 eggs are enough; in any case, they should be “large,” not “jumbo.” As for the spirits: I prefer to split the difference, going with 5 ounces of cognac and 3 ounces of rum. In 1862, there was a far greater variety of Madeiras available than there is today. I like a Bual in this.

  EGG NOGG

  The individual version.

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)

  1 TABLE-SPOONFUL OF FINE WHITE SUGAR, DISSOLVED WITH

  1 TABLE-SPOONFUL COLD WATER

  1 EGG

  1 WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] OF COGNAC BRANDY

  ½ WINE-GLASS [1 OZ] OF SANTA CRUZ RUM

  1/3 TUMBLERFUL OF MILK

  Fill the tumbler ¼ full with shaved ice, shake the ingredients until they are thoroughly mixed together, and grate a little nutmeg on top. Every well ordered bar has a tin egg-nogg“shaker”, which is a great aid in mixing this beverage.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: For Thomas’s Sherry Egg Nogg, replace the cognac and rum with two wineglasses of oloroso sherry and use only the yolk of the egg. Then “quaff the nectar cup.”

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: This is the only drink in Thomas’s book that explicitly calls for the use of the Cocktail shaker.

  GENERAL HARRISON’S EGG NOGG

  Benjamin “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison ran for president in 1840 on the “log cabin and hard cider” ticket, the idea being that he was a common man of the people who just wanted to drink cider and sit on the porch of his cabin. The people bought it.

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)

  1 EGG

  1½ TEA-SPOONFUL OF SUGAR

  2 OR 3 SMALL LUMPS [½ GLASS] OF ICE

  Fill the tumbler with cider, and shake well.This is a splendid drink, and is very popular on the Mississippi river. It was General Harrison’s favorite beverage.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: The cider should of course be hard. Try to get something artisanal, made from whole cider apples, not concentrate.

  TOM & JERRY

  The reporter came right out and asked him; what was he gonna do, say no? The Professor went into his spiel:

  One day in . . . 1847 a gentleman asked me to give him an egg beaten up in sugar. I prepared the article, and then . . . I thought to myself, ‘How beautiful the egg and sugar would be with brandy to it!’ I ran to the gentleman and, says I, ‘If you’ll only bear with me for five minutes I’ll fix you up a drink that’ll do your heartstrings good.’ He wasn’t at all averse to having the condition of his heartstrings improved, so back I went, mixed the egg and sugar, which I had beaten up into a kind of batter, with some brandy, then I poured in some hot water and stirred vigorously. The drink realised my expectations. It was the one thing I’d been dreaming of for months. . . . I named the drink after myself, kinder familiarly: I had two small white mice in those days, one of them I had called Tom and the other Jerry, so I combined the abbreviations in the drink, as Jeremiah P. Thomas would have sounded rather heavy, and that wouldn’t have done for a beverage.

  By the early 1880s, when Alan Dale—the reporter in question—encountered him, Thomas must’ve been telling that story for thirty years. When his obituaries were written, he was unquestioningly credited with the invention of this popular drink. (Indeed, this anecdote appears almost verbatim in his obituary in the New York Times.) In his book, he says that people even called it “Jerry Thomas.” In a way, he was the drink. I’m sure he got to the point that he was almost believing that he invented it himself.

  But he didn’t, as this little item from the Salem, Massachusetts, Gazette demonstrates:

  At the Police Court in Boston, last week, a lad about thirteen years of age was tried for stealing a watch, and acquitted. In the course of the trial, it appeared that the prosecutor [i.e., the pl
aintiff] sold to the lad, under the name of “Tom and Jerry,” a composition of saleratus [i.e., baking soda], eggs, sugar, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and rum. A female witness testified that the boy . . . appeared to be perfectly deranged, probably in consequence of the ‘hell-broth’ that he had been drinking.

  Thomas, you’ll recall, was born in 1830. This was published on March 20, 1827. Nor is this an isolated quote: numerous references to the drink from the 1830s and 1840s have turned up, all from New England. It’s quite possible, therefore, that Thomas mixed his first Tom & Jerry in 1847, while he was learning the bar business in new Haven, in the heart of the Tom & Jerry Belt. But the first? No way. No matter; if he didn’t invent the drink, he certainly did more than any other man to promote it.

  From after the Civil War until the late 1880s, come the cold weather in October or November, every saloon worth wrecking with a hatchet would get down the china Tom & Jerry bowl and the little “shaving mugs” that went with it (these sets were commercially available since at least the early 1870s) and the newspapers would start making spavined jokes about Thomas and Jeremiah, “two well-known sports” who had just showed up in town and “whose acquaintance should not be cultivated too deeply.” From then until spring, the bowl would be full of the foamy batter (or “dope,” as it was sometimes known), ready to be spooned into the little mugs, stiffened with booze, and heated with a little water or milk from the little boiler on the bar. Everyone loved it.

  But eventually tastes changed, and right around the time Jerry Thomas passed away, his semi-namesake began to share the fate of other drinks of its age and level of fanciness, to the point that in 1902 the New York Sun could write that it “seems to have vanished as absolutely as the dodo.” Fortunately, that was over-pessimistic; you could still find it at the more traditional places until Prohibition, and even now, in the heart of the Upper Midwest, there are bars that make Tom & Jerry every holiday season.

  (USE PUNCH-BOWL FOR THE MIXTURE.)

  5 LBS [2 LBS] SUGAR

  12 EGGS

  ½ SMALL GLASS [1 OZ] OF JAMAICA RUM

  1½ TEA-SPOONFUL OF GROUND CINNAMON

  ½ TEA-SPOONFUL OF GROUND CLOVES

  ½ TEA-SPOONFUL OF GROUND ALLSPICE

  Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and the yolks until they are thin as water, then mix together and add the spice and rum; thicken with sugar until the mixture attains the consistence of a light batter. N. B.—A tea-spoonful of cream of tartar, or about as much carbonate of soda as you can get on a dime, will prevent the sugar from settling to the bottom of the mixture. This drink is sometimes called Copenhagen, and sometimes Jerry Thomas.

  To deal out Tom and Jerry to customers:

  Take a small bar-glass, and to one table-spoonful of the above mixture, add one wine-glass [2 oz] of brandy, and fill the glass with boiling water; grate a little nutmeg on top. Adepts at the bar, in serving Tom and Jerry, sometimes adopt a mixture of ½ brandy, ¼ Jamaica rum, and ¼ Santa Cruz rum, instead of brandy plain.This compound is usually mixed and kept in a bottle, and a wine-glassful [2 oz] is used to each tumbler of Tom and Jerry.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: By today’s standards 5 pounds is a crazy amount of sugar. Two pounds should be plenty. The water can be replaced with hot milk, and often was by the turn of the twentieth century. It’s better that way, although there’s a certain austere ruggedness to the water version (if using water, add an extra pound of sugar, to give the drink a little more body).

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Whether you use water or milk, the mugs (an eBay item if ever there was one) should be rinsed with boiling water before being filled, to warm them.

  CHAPTER 6

  TODDIES, SLINGS, JULEPS, AND SUCH

  Before the Cocktail, there was the Toddy—or the Sling—or the Julep—or the Sangaree. Or anything else you wanted to call a glass of beverage alcohol with a little sugar in it, a little water if needed, and maybe a scrape of nutmeg over the top or a sprig or two of mint stuck in the glass.

  The very simplicity of these drinks led to a good deal of confusion between them, particularly when regional and national differences in nomenclature are factored in (a Yankee’s Sling, an Englishman’s Toddy, and an Irishman’s Skin might be made in the exact same way). Indeed, the three editions of Jerry Thomas’s book give a sheaf of overlapping recipes for Toddies and Slings in particular that differ only in the temperature of the H2O, the choice of base spirit, and the presence and absence of nutmeg.4

  The works of his contemporaries only add to the confusion. While the general rule of this book is to present definitive, original recipes in unmodified form, if ever there’s a place to break it, this is it. Since it’s fair to say that, in general (although, ironically, not in Jerry Thomas’s book), Toddy was perceived as a hot drink that you could also make cold, and Sling as a cold one that you could also make hot, I’ve used that as a sort of stick with which to thresh this large and incestuous family of drinks out into two master recipes, a Hot Toddy and a Cold Sling, each based on Jerry Thomas’s 1862 edition but incorporating some of the handy hints from elsewhere. If you want a Cold Toddy or a Hot Sling, just make a Cold Sling or a Hot Toddy and change the name, manipulating the nutmeg ad libitum.

  There are a few major variations, including the popular Sangaree, that achieved a life of their own; I’ve allowed them to roam free, below.

  I. RUM, BRANDY, WHISKEY, OR GIN TODDY, HOT

  Some time at the beginning of the 1750s, the great Early American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale—then a lad of twelve or so—put a vital question to a local Annapolis doctor. “What is the best drink for health?” The doctor, a gentleman of Scottish extraction, did not hem or haw. “Toddy, mun. The spirit must have something to act on, and therefore acts on the sugar and does nae injury to the stomach.” It’s a charming theory, anyway; how nice if it were true (another round of Piña Coladas over here, Ramon!). But whatever its benignity, Toddy hot in the winter and cold in the summer was one of the invariables of American drinking

  Hot drinks, too, required special equipment. This handy heater was designed to go on top of the ubiquitous potbellied stove. (Author’s collection)

  from the middle of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth—and, in some places, beyond. When I was a child, which was not so long ago as all that (we had Batman on the TV and Johnnie Eagle plastic M-14s to shoot our little friends with), my New England-born mother would, in circumstances of extreme chill, administer Toddy to my brother and me under the guise of Hot Buttered Rum. It was strictly medicinal, of course, and very much on the weak side, but nonetheless.

  Toddy—aka Sling, Sangaree, Skin, or Bombo, all more or less the same thing—is a simple drink in the same way a tripod is a simple device: Remove one leg and it cannot stand, set it up properly and it will hold the whole weight of the world. This mixture of spirits, hot or cold water, sugar, and perhaps a scraping of nutmeg is the irreducible minimum of true mixology. Take away any ingredient and you’re left with something less than a mixed drink. Except the nutmeg, that is—just as had occurred with the Bowl of Punch, the element of spice was soon recognized as inessential. But without the sugar, it’s just spirits and water. Sure, you can fit this out with a fancy name—call it a Grog or a Highball—but it’s still just watered booze. Without the water, it’s essentially a liqueur (provided you can get the sugar to dissolve in the first place), and not fit for serious drinking. And without the spirits—well, no. But get everything right (and Lord knows it’s easy enough) and it’s a drink all right. Indeed, like all truly great drinks, it’s sometimes a good deal more than that.

  Under the proper circumstances, a Hot Toddy—particularly one constructed upon a foundation of good Highland malt whisky—is one of the clearest signs I know that there is a providential plan to the universe. Of course, those circumstances include things like faulty central heating, dripping eaves, gray mists, chill drafts, and moth-eaten cardigan sweaters, a
ll of which are in short supply in modern American life. But it’s almost worth artificially creating them just to feel the blissful warmth seeping farther into every muscle and nerve with each sip until, as far as your body is concerned, you’re laying out on the Grand Anse beach in Grenada, not hunched against a cold and cutting nor’ easter. The old days were hard, but the people who lived them found ways of making them tolerable.

  Apparently of Scottish origin (although its print debut is found in a July 1750 issue of the Boston Weekly Post Boy), the “fashionable” Toddy—as the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury dubbed it in 1764—was a fixture of American tippling for a century or more. It didn’t hurt that, unlike Punch, the Toddy required no perishable ingredients or complicated formulae. Rum (or whiskey if you were out on the frontier, brandy if you were posh, applejack if you were from New Jersey, gin if you were of African or Dutch extraction, etc.). As much sugar as you liked, or had—no worries here about balancing out the acidity of lemons or limes. Water, hot or cold. If you had some nutmeg, fine; if not, fine, too. If there was no sugar, honey or even blackstrap molasses would do. You could make it strong or you could make it weak and sip it all day, as John Ferdinand Smyth found the Virginia planters doing in the 1780s. You could make it one glass or mug at a time, or—well, consider the way Pennsylvanian Joseph Price spent May 11, 1802: “had 3 Pints Whis[key], they Complaind of Cold very much, at Mothers Got a bowl hot Toddy then they Came home with me and I Made them 2 Bowls, made their harts Glad & away they went.” (Who’s “they”? He never does tell us; perhaps he should’ve waited until May 12 to update his diary.) In fact, the first published recipe for Toddy that I’ve been able to find, the one in Samuel Stearns’s 1801 American Herbal, makes a hefty quart of the stuff. One hopes that that wasn’t intended for one person.