In the early hours of Christmas Day 1826, cadets at West Point were chasing an officer with a drawn sword, smashing windows and stair railings, all because of a drink made from milk, eggs and sugar. They had smuggled in a few gallons of whiskey to fix a problem: the academy had announced that the Christmas eggnog would be alcohol-free. That night is the most famous thing eggnog has ever done, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the drink. It's a custard you can drink, it's been spiked for centuries, and people get very attached to it. Here's where it comes from, how to make a version that won't make anyone sick, and what the rest of the world pours at Christmas instead.
What Eggnog Actually Is
Eggnog is a chilled, sweetened, creamy drink made from milk or cream, sugar and whipped eggs, and often a spirit such as brandy, rum or bourbon. Nutmeg goes on top. In the United States and Canada it shows up in shops around American Thanksgiving and hangs on until the end of the holidays, and it turns up in lattes and ice cream too.
The carton in the supermarket isn't a free-for-all, either. US federal rules say that anything sold as eggnog must contain at least 6 percent milkfat and at least 1 percent egg yolk solids, and it must be pasteurized. That's the law on the store shelf. At home, the interesting question is the one in the middle of the cup: what do you do about the raw eggs? We'll get to that, with a recipe, but first the story.
Before the Nog: Posset
The ancestor is posset, a hot drink of milk curdled with wine or ale and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to the 15th century, and a book of household manners from around 1460 lists it among the dishes that "close a man's stomach," the end of a meal. People drank it for colds and to get to sleep. Some monks are said to have made a posset with eggs and figs, which makes it a possible precursor of the drink in your fridge, though the line from one to the other is a guess, not a family tree.
Rich households took posset seriously enough to own special sets for it: a pot, a bowl or cup to drink from, and little containers for the ingredients, often in silver and passed down as heirlooms. In Britain, eggnog itself stayed mostly an aristocrat's drink, because milk, eggs and sherry were foods of the wealthy, and it was used in toasts to good health.
Where the word "nog" comes from is honestly unsettled. The OED says a nog was a strong beer brewed in East Anglia. Another theory points to "noggin," a small carved wooden mug. A popular story says it's "egg and grog" squeezed together, but the vocabulary editor Ben Zimmer has called that theory unproven and suggests a link to "nugged ale," ale warmed with a hot poker. The earliest known use of the word "egg-nogg" is a poem by the American clergyman Jonathan Boucher from 1775, which wasn't published until decades after his death, and the first printed use is a New Jersey newspaper in 1788. Treat any single origin story, including the one you heard at a party, as a theory.
How Eggnog Became American
The drink crossed the Atlantic in the 1700s and found ideal conditions. Brandy and wine were heavily taxed, while rum from the Caribbean trade was cheap, and American farms had plenty of milk and eggs. When the Revolutionary War cut the rum supply, drinkers switched to domestic whiskey, and eventually to bourbon, and the American South still makes its eggnog with bourbon. By 1795 to 1797 an Anglo-Irish traveler named Isaac Weld was watching American travelers stop for a "hearty draught" of egg-nog, which he described as new milk, eggs, rum and sugar beaten together.
You'll see a recipe on the internet labeled "George Washington's eggnog," loaded with rye, rum, sherry and brandy. Mount Vernon's research historian calls the legend bunk, and says the estate has no references to eggnog there. The only drink recipe actually found in his papers is one for small beer. She also points out that the "Washington" recipes that circulate online often travel with other dishes that call for a can of sweetened condensed milk, which didn't exist in his day.
The best-documented eggnog event in American history is the Eggnog Riot. On 22 December 1826, a few West Point cadets crossed the Hudson by boat to buy whiskey for a Christmas party, and brought back two gallons of it, plus a gallon of rum from another tavern. The party in the North Barracks began on the 24th. By the time it ended on Christmas morning, more than a third of the cadets had joined in, officers had been threatened, and windows and railings were wrecked. Investigators implicated 70 cadets and court-martialed 20 of them, along with one enlisted soldier. Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, was there, but he wasn't court-martialed. Drinking among the academy's 260 cadets had already worried the staff under superintendent Sylvanus Thayer. The riot got a name instead.
The colonial taverns are gone, but the cities aren't: our guides to 5 Days in Boston, 5 Days in New York and 5 Days in Washington, DC walk through the streets where the early republic drank.
A Classic Cooked Eggnog, With Real Quantities
First, the safety part
Eggs can carry Salmonella, and a drink made from raw eggs and nothing else doesn't kill it. The FDA's holiday food-safety guidance gives three ways out: buy a pasteurized eggnog, use pasteurized eggs, or add the eggs to the liquid in the recipe and heat the mixture until a food thermometer reads 160 F (71 C). Then cool it quickly, in a bowl of ice or cold water, and keep it refrigerated.
What about the alcohol? Plenty of people swear it makes raw eggnog safe. The food safety researchers at NC State say ethanol alone isn't a dependable safeguard. The popular "aged eggnog" idea traces back to one anecdotal experiment, which was done on a very strong, refrigerated nog. Cook the base and you don't have to rely on a story.
The recipe
This is the FDA's own eggnog, which is alcohol-free and makes about 2 quarts (roughly 2 liters).
- 1 quart (4 cups) 2% milk
- 6 eggs
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 cup whipping cream, whipped
- Ground nutmeg for the top
- Heat the milk in a large saucepan until hot, but don't boil or scald it.
- Beat the eggs and salt in a large bowl, adding the sugar gradually.
- Slowly pour the hot milk into the eggs, stirring all the time.
- Pour it all back into the saucepan and cook on medium-low heat, whisking constantly, until it thickens and just coats a spoon. The thermometer should read 160 F (71 C).
- Stir in the vanilla. Cool it fast by setting the pan in ice or cold water and stirring for about 10 minutes.
- Cover and refrigerate for several hours or overnight, until thoroughly chilled.
- Pour into a bowl or pitcher, fold in the whipped cream, and dust with nutmeg.
To make it boozy, stir the spirit in once the custard is cooked, never before. Texas Cooking's cooked eggnog uses 3/4 cup of dark or light rum with 6 eggs and 1 quart of milk, so for the batch above about 1 cup of rum, brandy or bourbon is a fair starting point. Add half, taste, then decide. Keep the kids' share separate and label it, since the base is the same.
Eggnog's Cousins Around the World
Almost every place that has milk, eggs and a local spirit has its own version. This tour starts in the Caribbean, where the colonial drink picked up coconut, works down through Latin America, then crosses to Europe, where the egg-and-spirit idea has much older roots.
Coquito is Puerto Rico's Christmas drink, "little coconut." It's made with Puerto Rican rum, coconut milk, cream of coconut and sweetened condensed milk, and it's served after dinner in a shot glass. Some cooks add eggs and plenty don't. Families guard their own recipes, and New York's El Museo del Barrio holds an annual contest called Coquito Masters, a long way from Puerto Rico and just as serious about it.
Rompope is the one closest to eggnog proper: eggs, milk, vanilla and rum, yellow from the yolks. It's drunk across Mexico, Central America and Ecuador, and in Mexico the story goes that nuns in the convents of Puebla first made it. Treat that as a story. Texas Cooking's recipe uses 12 egg yolks, a quart of milk and 2 cups of rum, which is why it's sipped from small glasses all over Mexico.
Ponche crema is Venezuela's version, and it's a rare case with a name and a date. The commercial product was created by the Caracas chemist and perfumer Eliodoro González P. in 1900, and the recipe is still secret. It's served cold in small cups at Christmas all over Venezuela, and it has crossed the water to Trinidad and Tobago, which makes its own Ponche de Crème.
Cola de mono, "monkey's tail," is the holiday drink of Chile, and it has no eggs in the version most people list: aguardiente, milk, coffee, sugar and spices, usually with the Christmas fruitcake called pan de Pascua. The name has at least three origin stories, from a monkey on a bottle label of Spanish anise liqueur to a 1901 election joke. Take your pick.
Peru has a looser cousin. The "biblia con pisco" often gets listed as the Peruvian eggnog, but the recipe in the Lima newspaper El Comercio is a shaken cocktail: pisco, port, evaporated milk and egg, with ice and cinnamon. It's a drink in the same family, but not a Christmas tradition we could find.
Advocaat is the cousin from the Netherlands, a thick, custard-like liqueur of egg yolks, sugar and brandy, usually between 14 and 20 percent alcohol. Its name has two stories: a Brazilian avocado drink the Dutch brought home, or "lawyer's drink," advocatenborrel. The German egg liqueur is called Eierlikör, and one big maker, Verpoorten, founded in 1876 in Heinsberg, ran a 1961 ad slogan that went "Ei, ei, ei - Verpoorten."
Germany also has a hot, wine-based relative, the Eierpunsch: eggs, sugar, white wine, cloves, tea, citrus and cinnamon. In Iceland eggnog is served hot, as a dessert.
Zabaglione is egg yolks, sugar and sweet wine, usually Moscato d'Asti, whipped over a bain-marie. It's usually a dessert, sometimes a drink, and a recipe for it sits in a 15th-century Neapolitan manuscript from the south of Italy. The French call it sabayon.
Where to Go From Here
Whatever eggnog's exact ancestry, the pattern is clear: a milk-and-egg drink keeps picking up whatever the local kitchen has. Rum in the colonies, coconut in Puerto Rico, coffee in Chile, pisco in Peru, wine in Germany and Italy. If you travel for food, the holiday drink is a good way into a place. Pair this with our best Christmas markets in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian cakes that go with a cup of something warm, or a trip to London to see where the English drink began. And if you want to test your sense of where all these drinks live, try Pinpoint.
