From the Vault: 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. (originally published 12/15/2022)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday time for
an episode from the Vault. This one originally aired December fifteenth,
twenty twenty two, and it's called a Goblet of Eggnog.
It's all about that thick, thick drink.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
That's right. I was on the fence. I was like,
is it too early to rerun the eggnog episode? And
then I had to remind myself, well, I've already had
my first cup of eggnog for this holiday season, so
obviously it is not too early.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
You really want to listen to this episode before you
do most of your eggnog drinking for the year, not after.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Right, right. Yeah. It's stuff to discuss during the preparation
or to take with you to the store when you
purchase it. I think it's been on the shelves in
the grocery store since like mid October or something.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
I'm surprised they haven't rebranded it as a Halloween drink
as well, have orange eggnog. I mean, there you go,
Green free ideas, here, free ideas.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Vampire dog.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Yeah, all right, well, let's uh, let's pour it up
and have a sip. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Mind production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

(01:26):
It's that time of year again, and by that time,
I mean it is the holidays. We're knee deep, perhaps
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

(01:47):
actually going to be our third installment in our Holiday
Invention series, where we more or less give the invention
treatment to various holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year,
we're going to be looking in earnest at eggnog.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Is eggnog an invention? Sure, we can stretch the definition.
I think that's okay.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
I think so. I mean, we did an invention, a
full blown invention episode about the Matai, which we you know,
we had Jeff beach bombarry on as a guest to
talk about that eggnog 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

(02:31):
one of those things that has a number of different
customs and cultural details surrounding it. Now, Joe, I'm not
sure what your relationship with eggnog happens to be, because
I don't know that we've ever really spoken about this.
I don't think we've had eggnog together before, not that
I recall, but my family's general approach is originally buy
a carton of almond nag each year, largely for our

(02:53):
son because he gets super into it. And if I
have a chance to visit a like an upscale cocktail
or a nice restaurant, then I will jump at the
opportunity to order an eggnog if they have one on
the menu. In the past, I've made it down to
New Orleans for the start of Beach Bumberry Sipping Santa
festivities at Beach bumb Berry's Latitude twenty nine. They also

(03:16):
have pop ups all over the place, and they'll generally
have at least one holiday tiki beverage on there that
is at least eggnog esque in form.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
I'm picturing piles of crushed or pellet ice with kind
of a frothy, creamy grime about them, and some nutmeg
sprinkled over top.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Oh yeah, the nutmeg, as we'll discuss, is pretty essential.
So I did make it down there this year, but
I did make it over to a tiki bar in
our area, Decatur's Sost Bar, and I enjoyed a frozen
take on a classic eggnog. So generally a rich drink though,
so once twice three times per year max. That's generally

(03:58):
enough for me. 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 glass of eggnog here for me
to consume during this episode. 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.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Wait, is this full boozeggnog or.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Well you might well presume that, but I couldn't possibly comment. Yes, creamy, rich,
hint of nutmeg, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I have no eggnog in the house. A cute cute
Joe Peshei 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, that was pretty
much where my head was at. I was like, yeah,
Joe Peshi in Home Alone is correct. I found the
idea revolting. Not just revolting. I I think I probably

(04:57):
found it borderline nauseating to think of a drink made
out of eggs. Something changed over the years. Now I
find it quite delightful.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
So it was the eggs that threw you off?

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, well 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 they make them at the cracker barrel.
You know, I'm thinking of like a thick, yellow curd
like substance, and always in savory context. I mean, I know,
obviously now that eggs are used in all kinds of

(05:28):
baking and sweet contexts, but that's not how I thought
about them when I was a kid. So the idea
of drinking a sweet egg based beverage was absolutely vile
to my brain.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
I can understand that. I mean, 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 researching this episode. Oftentimes the way we encounter
it now it's egg n og, but some of these

(06:03):
other spellings will be egg n ogg. I like the
double the double g's occurring in both parts of the work.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
That's just symmetry, that's good branding.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yes, now, before we proceed, I guess we should go
ahead and drive home exactly what eggnog is. 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 civilization where you
can have something that is identifiable as a nog without

(06:36):
the presence of egg or dairy. But historically this is
the realm from which this beverage arises.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Right. So you you mentioned almond nog. I guess that
is equivalent in the same way that you might have
almond milk. It is a substitute for milk.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
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 of the when I guess something like a
soy nog or an almond nog is going to have
neither eggs nor dairy, and so it is even further removed.
But yet it's still very much in the spirit of
the classic nog, so I think it more than qualifies.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, nog is a thick, creamy, sweet drink.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yes, it's a state of mind. It's a holiday tradition. Now,
one of the sources I'm going to refer back to
several times in this episode is the excellent book Imbibe
exclamation Point by David Wandriche, 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

(07:39):
up on the history of the American cocktail. This is
a great book. It's cites, among many others, the legendary
professor Jerry Thomas who lived eighteen thirty through eighteen eighty five,
the New Orleans bartender who wrote the seminal Bartender's Guide
and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general. We're go into
more depth on this in an older episode episodes that

(08:00):
we did together on Mixology.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
I think we ended up talking about absinthe a lot
in those.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, that would make sense, and I know Jerry Thomas
also comes up in the recent episode on ice the
interview that I did. But according to Wondrich, 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. Wondridge includes a recipe from

(08:30):
Jerry Thomas. Jerry Thomas would have you know, brought up
together a bunch of these different recipes for drinks 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 wondridch includes a quote from This is an eighteen

(08:51):
seventy three quote from the 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.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Hmmm, that's that's good. No. One thing I have to
point out is that when you listed the ingredients, you
did not list milk. So I assume these are the
things that are added to the milk.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Yes, yes, okay, yeah. The milk would would also be
be an important part of this. It's so already we're
kind of in the territory of what we think of
when we think about eggnog. But of course there are
no eggs there now when it comes to eggnog itself.
Thomas was very much of the opinion that eggnog was
quote a beverage of American origin, and Wondrich states that

(09:43):
quote the drink's earliest mentions come from a seventeen eighty
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 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

(10:05):
quote it is a favorite of all seasons, he was
certainly overstating the case.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
So you bring up that mention in the seventeen eighty
eight newspaper, and this name drop 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,

(10:33):
as the Simpsons proposed, you equally whip up a cauldron
of corn nog.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Corn dog sounds kind of delicious, like it brings to
mind like corn puddings.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I think it occurs in the Simpsons episode with the hurricane,
when the stores are there's a run on the Quickie
Mart and the only things left on the shelves are
corn nog and wadded beef. But anyway, diving into the
history and etymology of eggnog, corn nog, whatever, what have you?
Any nogs? My source here is a December two thousand

(11:05):
and nine article called the Origins of Eggnog Holiday Grog
by the American Linguist and Language columnist Ben Zimmer, who
is brother of the excellent science writer Karl Zimmer, who's
been a guest on the show before Huh Crazy. So
here's what Ben Zimmer says about nog. The word nog
first shows up as a regional term in England, specifically

(11:28):
in the region of East Anglia, so it's the eastern
part of the country containing Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, and
it referred that term. They are referred to a type
of beer. We know this because of a letter written
from the County of Norfolk in the year sixteen ninety
three by a man named Humphrey Priudeaux, who described quote

(11:52):
a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country
they call nog. So nog is high gravity beer, it's
strong stuff. But to take one step back, why would
the East Anglians call strong beer noog? Zimmer identifies a
couple of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from

(12:12):
the word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated
slang for head for your head. But before that nogin
meant a small mug or a small drink of spirits.
So perhaps noggin was shorter was shortened to nog, and
it came to refer to the beer inside the mug

(12:33):
instead of the mug itself. And we do that kind
of metonymy 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, right.
But another idea is that the word noog for strong
beer comes from a Scottish word nug or nugged ale,

(12:55):
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 content, because
drinks with higher alcohol content are often said to taste
warm or even to burn.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Hmmm, yeah, this is this is interesting. It brings to mind,
you know, the images of some of these older drinks
where you'd you would you would stick the 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 getting a drink
of this fashion.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
M 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.

(13:56):
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 eggnog was boozy. That
was a primary characteristic of what the noog was. It
had a lot of alcohol in it.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, absolutely, That's exactly what I saw in all of
my research. Nobody's talking about eggnog is something that is
then spiked. It is inherently spiked.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
And Zimmer reports that a Maryland clergyman named Jonathan Bouche
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 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,

(14:47):
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 palette can regale. So you
see the The context here is fully alcoholic grog refers
to a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Then there's that line
fog DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. A

(15:11):
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 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

(15:32):
on the way here.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
All right, well, yeah, this is making sense. An early
morning drink though, because you get your fog protection, you
get a couple of eggs in there. Maybe you know
this is a breakfast that you're drinking down exactly.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
So Bouchet may have written that in seventy seventy five.
It's hard to say for sure, but according to Zimmer,
the earliest rock solid references to eggnog where we know
the date of their public appear in a handful of
newspapers in the year seventeen eighty eight, as you mentioned earlier. Now,
one is a March seventeen eighty eight report in the

(16:09):
New Jersey Journal, which and I love that this is
what some newspaper articles consisted of at the time. 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,

(16:30):
and another of brandy sling.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
Yeah, is this what newspapers were back in the day?
Did you have like a gluttony page for You're like,
what's everybody overeating in New Jersey?

Speaker 2 (16:40):
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 seventeen eighty eight in the
Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia, where a writer was complaining about
an upset stomach and wrote, quote, when wine and beer,

(17:03):
punch and eggnog meat instantly ensues.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
A quarrel, that there's wisdom to that, I think.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
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 punch and eggnog in there.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
You know, we were looking back at a time when
drinking was a little more robust throughout the country.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
I think, yeah. 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. 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

(17:48):
Zimmer also documents how an early example of eggnog was
associated with Christmas celebration by citing a piece in the
Virginia Chronicle from January seventeen ninety three, which reads as follows.
On last Christmas Eve, several gentlemen met at Northampton Courthouse
and spent the evening in mirth and festivity when eggnog

(18:11):
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 verses extempore, which should be rhyme
and sense. Okay, he's like, we're so drunk, I bet
none of you can write four lines of poetry that

(18:31):
will make sense and rhyme. So what do 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,
but Eggnog's drafts afford her solid fare. So move over, wine.

(18:55):
The muses are no longer interested in you now they
will only be singing to people who are chug and agnog.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Eggnog doesn't seem to have a personification though, Like, there's
no like Satyr of Egnog.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Right, the Dionysus of Eggnog.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, I suppose it's. You know, he was before its time.
I think he would he would have approved of Egnog,
especially based on these historical references to agno.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
So do we know exactly what they were putting in
eggnog at the time. Well, there's a book from seventeen
ninety nine called Travels through the States of North America
and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada during the
years seventeen ninety five, ninety six and ninety seven by
an Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld. And this

(19:40):
passage actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing
I think David Wondrich who said that sometimes people from
Europe might encounter egnog and think, oh what what you know,
what crimes they're committing against a drinking culture here in
the Americas. And I wonder if there's a little bit
of that kind of raised eyebrow going on in this passage.

(20:01):
But we'll see what you think. So Weld is writing
about a stop at an inn near Baltimore, Maryland, where
he writes, 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, before they pursued
their journey, took a hearty draft each. According to custom

(20:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, this is 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 egnog, and there's this kind of
sense that eggnog is this drink for everybody. Eggnog's this
drink for kids. And as you get older, then you're
perhaps in a situation where you can have the eggnog

(21:04):
with something added to it, eggnog plus you know, if
you like. But this that the historical truth of eggnog
is no, this is the thing that the really drunken
adults are having sometimes first thing in the morning.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Also regarding famous eggnog recipes from the early days of
the United States, 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

(21:41):
it was actually Washington's. But according to the Farmer's Almanac,
this famous recipe goes as follows. It's one quart cream,
one quart milk, 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,

(22:02):
separate the yolks in 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 peaks form, then fold slowly into the mixture.
Then you let it sit in a cool place for
several days. Then quote taste frequently. And I could be wrong,

(22:24):
but I believe this is the recipe that our colleague,
our colleague Alex Williams uses when he makes his famous
eggnog for all of our coworkers.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yes, it definitely is. This is definitely the recipe he
would use, and it is quite delightful. But yeah, I
encountered the same thing. Looking at the actual history of this,
there's some doubt as to whether George Washington actually serve this,
And then there are some accounts that say, well, it
looks like maybe there's evidence that eggnog was served at

(22:56):
Mount Vernon but 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 president who did have
a recipe for eggnog and did serve it and drink it.
All right, all this being said, before we proceed with eggnog,
I think we can at least consider the possibility of predecessors. That, Yes,

(23:22):
even if egnog is something that emerges in North America,
there are at least things not unlike agnog that one
can encounter, say in at least late medieval and post
medieval Europe.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Oh yes, some gorgeous textures to imagine.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah, so let's go back to the late Middle Ages
and drink some hard milk. So European holiday traditions, which
of course inform holiday traditions and Colonial America and beyond
are a mix of Christian traditions, more ancient traditions, and
a great deal of regional variability. I was, in fact,
just researching the hoodin Hoden Horse of Kent for the

(24:02):
Monster Fact series, and I think that's a great example
of this. It brings to mind various costume street wandering
traditions as well as caroling and was sailing. Wassaile, of course,
is a door to door ritualistic and communal hot drink
that typically contained mold cider ale or wine and spices.

(24:23):
But then there is the tradition of the posset, posset
the passet. Yes, the Smithsonian Magazine website has a nice
article about this, titled Past the Posset colon the Medieval
Eggnog by Lisa Braman, 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

(24:46):
post medieval world and beyond. Anyway, the passet itself is
a drinking vessel, as Brayman points out, and you see
mention of it even in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which Lady
Macbeth poisons the possets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Oh I forgot about that.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
I had as well, when when the author here brings
it up, I'm like, oh, yeah, I do remember that
line vaguely. But you encounter so many archaic cords if
you're reading or performing Shakespeare that you can't stop to wonder.
Overall it's enough to be like, okay, it's this means
drinking vessel. Okay, what's the next strange word that doesn't
quite register for me? Let me translate that one in

(25:25):
my head. But this is a If you can actually
look up examples of this vessel online, the pauset this
P O S S E T, 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

(25:46):
with a lid on top, and the stem for it,
you know, like that like a te kettle. It feeds
from the bottom of the vessel rather than from the
middle or the top of the vessel. The reason for
this design, according to brain And, is that you can
drink directly from the stem to get at the liquid
contents of the of the of the liquid it contains,

(26:07):
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 have a mixture of things. You're
gonna have a fluid beneath and kind of a chonky
chonky creamy perhaps cheesy layer at the top.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
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 with a spoon.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yes, the way that 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 of frothy dessert things

(26:58):
we have today. I think about certain milkshakes, certain smoothies,
certainly especially the older school cappuccinos, where the foam cap
on 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 this potential hygiene issues aside of late medieval ages.

(27:22):
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 consumption, though nowadays I do
want to point out we do have things like the
spoon straw, which is like a plastic usually like a

(27:44):
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 poset.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
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 some like drinking out of
the stem of a tea kettle.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah, yeah, it does seem like you might burn your
mouth with this, So recorded recipes, many of these came later.
I believe they called if you were going to fill
the pauset, it would call for a great deal of
egg and cream. They might also call for beer, sugar,
and also thickening agents such as bread, biscuits, oatmeal, and

(28:24):
almond paste. In some cases, the upper portions are said
to take on a cheesey quality, which actually brings to
mind modern cheese milk tea drinks, which are quite delightful
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

(28:44):
what you're imagining if you're imagining something 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 slight cheesy twist.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
To it, not like provolone.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Right right now. I should also mention there are more
contemporary posset dishes, such as you often see recipes for
something called a lemon passet, 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,

(29:21):
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
you went back to the late medieval ages and you're like,
where's my eggnog and people are like what are you
talking about? You might discover the posset and be like, oh,
well this will work, this will do. Now my holiday

(29:43):
is complete.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, it's a liquidy egg and milk or egg and
cream type.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Thing, right, And I think it's not crazy to imagine
that this sort of precedent for this sort of drink
and the sort of taste sensations that it brings about,
this could feed into the very American traditions that would,
according to Thomas, bring about the American eggnog.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
So I assume after we get out of this early
period where mentions are scarce and don't really explain much
about eggnog except like the Irish guy who's clearly not
familiar with it, we get into a period where there
is more extensive writing on eggnog, maybe like in actual
cookery manuals.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot more material on You was
a certain point, and Wondrich has a whole chapter on
egg drinks in his book im Vibe. As he writes it,
there 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

(30:46):
the things that really amazed me about all this, though,
is that Wondredge points out that egg drinks were once
far more common and kind of a daily affair, but
that few survive today. This kind of comes back to
your example earlier about egg nog for breakfast, Why not perfect,
keep the fog away, et cetera. Now, now I should

(31:06):
point out this is the two thousand and 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 re explore older fashions 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,

(31:28):
you probably won't find them on just random restaurant cocktail menus.
Like I don't know if Chili's offers an egg drink.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
I'm trying to think, what are the standard egg drinks other? Well,
I guess there are like drinks I don't usually get,
but like, aren't there like sours and fizzes and stuff
that that have egg whites in them? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Wondred points out that the major survivors include the nineteenth
century Tom and Jerry drink. This would be not getting
into the proportions, but it's like sugar, eggs rum, cinnamon, cloves,
all spies. There's the sherry flip, which is basically egg,
sugar and sherry, and he discusses his elsewhere in the book.
But of course there's the Ramos gin Fizz, which is
pretty famous New Orleans drink that contains gin, simple syrup,

(32:13):
lemon juice, lime juice, egg white, heavy cream, orange flour, water,
and club soda. It's one that famously requires a great
deal of shaking. You may you may receive a dirty
look from the bartender when you order it because of
all the shaking it's going to require. Sometimes they have
to pass it off to another bartender to continue shake
shaking it. But it is also a delightful drink. But yeah,

(32:35):
he Wonderedge points out though, that even though we only
have so many egg drinks that kind of survived, there
was this time where where egg 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

(33:00):
which eggnog is stocked at the grocery store year round
to meet people's demand. For it, and everybody's having it
boozed up. Not that they bought it at the grocery store,
they made. You get my point.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
That's that sounds like a magical time.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
A very rich, rich time.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
But as Paul Clark points out in the Imbibed magazine article,
elements egg cocktails, changing tastes and salmonella scares pretty much
chased raw eggs out of the bar. And 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

(33:40):
can imagine, perhaps you know their new fads and cocktails,
new ingredients are more readily available for cocktails. And then
there's this whole issue of salmonella.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Salmonella concerns, of course, remain relevant to this day, and
we'll come back to those in just a few minutes now.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Wonder Che also points out there was a great deal
of variation when it came to egg recipes, which I
imagine is going to be the case with any popular drink,
even if the recipe isn't secret. 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 it is if there's no secret, if the recipe

(34:17):
is well known, you're going to end up having deviations anyway.
For instance, anywhere you go today the my tie recipe,
there's no telling what a restaurant will actually serve you
if you order a my tie, even though 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 it out. But these regional differences in eggnog,

(34:42):
this would this would really make people emotional. Wonderdch Show
points out this account where there's a judge who encountered
eggnog in an inn and it didn't have whiskey enough
in it, and therefore there was this huge altercation.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Ohll yeah, I mean again, going back to stories about ends.
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.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
Yeah, if I don't get my heavily alcoholic eggnog in
the morning. I'm no good now. Sometimes those regional differences, though,
are going to be entirely based on what is available
to you, and a great example of this is the
Texian version of eggnog. He includes the recipe in the book.
It stems from General Thomas Green of the Army of

(35:33):
the Texas Republic from eighteen forty three. The recipe serves
about one hundred and sixty It calls for seven gallons
of mescal, seven gallons of donkey milk, thirty dozen eggs,
and a large loaf of sugar.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
I love that sugar used to come in loaves.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, oh, if you're making eggnog for one hundred and
sixty and a number of these recipes do call for
large vats of eggnog, but this is quite a lot.
I mean, seven gallons of mezcal, seven gallons of donkey milk.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
I've never tasted donkey milk. I don't even know what
that would.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Be like again two thousand and seven book, but Wondrich
mentioned that donkey milk was becoming popular at the time
in Europe due to this. I supposely 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
fied stores. But then again, I'm not really in the

(36:29):
market for donkey milk anyway. Well, Wondrich roughly translates the
recipe for modern drinkers in that book. He of course
says you can use cow milk instead of donkey milk,
and he also recommends grating a little chocolate on top.
So Jerry Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and

(36:50):
Wondrich includes recipes for three of them in his book.
Roughly speaking, these are the contents 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, cognac, Santa Cruz, rum and milk. And

(37:11):
then there's General Harrison's eggnog. This is ninth American President
William Henry Harrison, and this was said to be one
of his favorites. It called for egg, 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'm not really

(37:34):
at home in this old 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?

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah? That was him saying like, I'm just a hard
working frontiersman. I'm not one of these elites.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, but I don't know. I mean, I appreciate hardsider,
but this sounds horrific. I don't think I would I
would want any part of this. So General Harrison, no,
thank you.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
General Harrison also died about some like thirty days into
his first presidential term. 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 the water supply
at the White House at the time was heavily contaminated

(38:24):
with raw sewage.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Huh. Interesting. I had a whole tangent for this episode
about twelfth US President Zachary Taylor, who fell ill with
a fatal illness on July fourth of eighteen fifty after
a DC fundraiser that he attended where he quote drank
freely of iced water and chilled milk. According to biographer K.

(38:47):
Jack Bauer in the book Zachary Taylor's Soldier, Planter Statesman
of the Old Southwest. So I've seen this described as
copious amounts of cherries and iced milk. Apparently he preferred
drinking chilled milk. That was his thing. That was the
hardest drink that Zachary Taylor was known to imbibe himself.

(39:07):
But I cut most of this out because he wasn't
drinking as far as I can tell, a cherry chilled
milk concoction. It was just chilled milk and then also
a lot of cherries.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
And probably plenty of raw sewage.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Oh is it time for salmonella?

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Oh yeah, that's a great transition. So eggs and salmonilla.
Salmonilla remains probably the main reason people have reservations about
raw egg based food and drinks today. Salmonilla is a
genus of bacteria named not after salmon the fish, but
after an American veterinarian named Daniel Elmer Salmon. Though it

(39:55):
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 assistant's
name was Theobald Smith, but of course the boss gets
all the glory. Some zero types of salmonella are responsible

(40:16):
for really serious and historically significant diseases such as typhoid fever,
but multiple types of salmonilla will result in infections of
the intestinal tract. So salmonilla infection or salmonellosis, is one
of the most common food borne illnesses, often characterized by fever, diarrhea,
severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and headache. And because salmonella

(40:42):
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, salmonella
can also be transmitted between animals and humans, so animal
vectors such as eggs from infected chickens, can be a
major source of salmonillosis in humans as well. Now, on

(41:06):
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 CDC estimate that roughly one in every twenty thousand
chicken eggs in the United States was contaminated. That number

(41:28):
may be different today. If so, it is probably somewhat
lower than that. But 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 egg is going to make you sick. Also, eggs
are fine if you cook them to the proper temperature
for the proper time. One hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit

(41:51):
will kill just about anything instantly. Also, you know, even
lower temperatures, if held for a sufficient amount of time,
will be enough to to basically sterilize eggs. This is
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

(42:12):
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
is some risk of salmonilla infection. 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.

(42:36):
This is a study published in The Lancet in nineteen
seventy five by Steer at All called person to person
spread of salmonilla typhimurium after a hospital common source outbreak.
So the abstract reads, in September nineteen seventy three, diarrhea
caused by salmonilla typhimurium developed in thirty two people in

(42:59):
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 employees had not
had eggnog, and their illness developed after the source of
infection had been recognized and removed. Most of these people

(43:21):
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 salmonilla typhimurium can occur
in hospitals and can be 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

(43:45):
infections to others who didn't even touch the noog. Also,
I wanted to share another medical journal article I found
just because I thought it was very weird. This is
called eyelid absess in an eggnog drinker by Marcus and Wolverson,
published in the British Medical Journal nineteen eighty nine. Short

(44:05):
story is a seventy two year old man showed up
at a hospital in England with a huge abscess swelling
on his left upper eyelid, which they eventually determined had
spread to an infection of the bone in his forehead,
the bone above where his eye was. So he was
put under general anesthesia and the absess was drained. They

(44:26):
did a culture of the pus and it revealed the
presence of a type of salmonella. They eventually did another
procedure to take care of the swelling in the 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 salmonilla infection

(44:48):
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
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 it frequently,

(45:09):
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
eyelid absess, but that there are other known cases of
this bacterial infection spreading from a gut infection originally to

(45:30):
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 of age.
And finally, the author's write quote, from nineteen eighty one
to nineteen eighty six, the proportion of salmonilla infections caused
by salmonella, and then they're talking about a specific type here,

(45:53):
salmonilla teriditis rose from eleven percent to twenty eight percent.
This rise was due mainly to a rise in phage
type four infections. Transmission of this phage type has been
increasingly associated with poultry, and it is now known to
be transmitted in eggs. Egg born salmonilla teroiditis is destroyed

(46:16):
by thorough cooking. The raw egg in 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, I'm sure a lot of people out
there are wondering, Wait a minute. Okay, obviously, you know
you mix up a bunch of raw eggs and you

(46:38):
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?

Speaker 1 (46:49):
Yeah? And we're talking a lot of alcohol in some
of these recipes.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Now, frustratingly, 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 conflicting data points. But I'll share a few
of the results I came across. So one thing I

(47:14):
found is a study in the International Journal of Food
Microbiology published in nineteen ninety called Survival of pathogenic microorganisms
in an eggnog like product containing seven percent ethanol. This
is by notermans at all, So this is a lab test.
They say, let's make some boozy eggnog and directly inject

(47:35):
pathogenic microorganisms in there and see what happens. So they
say a liquor consisting of whole egg sacros meaning sugar
twenty five percent and ethanol of seven percent was artificially
contaminated with Salmonella teriditis, salmonilla, typhomurium, Staphylococcus aureus, three different

(47:58):
strains Basillis serious, and Listeria. And they say, after three
weeks of incubation at twenty two degrees celsius twenty two
degrees celsius is about seventy one degrees fahrenheit room temperature,
the numbers of salmonilla, Staphylococcus aureus, and of the Listeria

(48:18):
species they use decreased by more than three log based
ten units, and if I understand correctly, I believe that's
a ninety nine point nine percent reduction in the number
of bacteria units there. They say, under such conditions, however,
the total number of microorganisms increased three log ten units.
Then they say at four degrees celsius, so I think

(48:41):
this would be simulating refrigerator temperatures. The decrease of pathogenic
microorganisms was much slower, 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.

(49:04):
But in this study, the presence of seven percent straight
ethanol significantly reduced the amount of salmonilla staff in listeria
over the course of three weeks at room temperature and
over the course of seven weeks at fridge temperature. However,
other microorganisms can grow.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
I'm pretty sure this recipe for agnog that they used
is the doctor cushion catheter right, recipe for agnog With
all of these added diseases.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
You can just imagine Christopher Lee drooling over it. Well,
the Stanton Twins dance. But 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.

(49:52):
It was done in the late two thousands by microbiologists
at the at Rockefeller University named Vince Faschetti and Ray
and Shuck and it was covered on Science Friday. And
apparently these researchers used a recipe that the staff at
the university would make every year, which originally traced back
to the great American microbiologist Rebecca Lancefield. So this is

(50:15):
her original eggnog recipe. She had worked at Rockfiller University
decades earlier. Apparent they're still making her eggnog years after
she passed away. And the recipe includes raw eggs, but
also cream, sugar, and a lot of hard liquor. The
liquors in this version are Bourbon and rum NPR reported

(50:35):
that the alcohol concentration of the final drink was about
twenty percent. And the way they would do it is
every year they'd make it before Thanksgiving and then enjoy
it around Christmas time. So it had an incubation period
in the refrigerator of about six weeks. So for this experiment,
the researchers made their usual noog, but they deliberately spiked

(50:57):
it once again with salmonilla. Just you can watch video
of this. They're just injecting this orange juice into the eggs.
It's disgusting. 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

(51:17):
various stages of preparation and incubation to see what grew
over the course of the next three weeks. So egg
plus salmonilla with no alcohol, that's just it formed a
solid mat of salmon just huge boom, millions of bacteria. Disgusting.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Hey, you can need your spoon in your poset for
that one ugh.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Egg plus salmonilla plus alcohol with the sample taken immediately
after mixing give you a modest reduction, but still plenty
of salmonilla growth. This would still absolutely make you sick.
Egg plus salmonilla plus alcohol, but one day after mixing,
still plenty of salmonilla, but less than the one taken

(51:59):
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 this batch went from biohazard

(52:20):
to presumably safe. 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 could really
commit to our result and just drink it, but maybe not,
which makes sense right, like why risk it? And that

(52:43):
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 in got a contaminated egg, given enough alcohol and
an enough time, the noog would probably be safe. But

(53:03):
there are a lot of variables here, and so it
seems like a bunch of public health and food safety
sources are still cautious. They're still kind of cagy 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 pasteurized eggs from a carton which have
been rendered safe by preheating in the facility where they
were packaged, or they also recommend cooking the eggs. Basically,

(53:28):
like sources citing experts at the FDA or the USDA
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 gently bringing up to one hundred and sixty degrees
fahrenheit while stirring to kill any possible bacterial content before

(53:50):
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 neutralize the main bacteria that people are worried about,
meaning salmonilla, given enough alcohol and enough time. And I

(54:14):
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 looks like some experts still have concerns that
this might not always work, and caution that if you

(54:34):
want to make sure you're safe, you should cook your
eggs or use a pasteurized product.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
I mean, this is also enough to make one rethink
eating raw cookie dough and so forth.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Oh yeah, I mean, well, it's true, I guess of
anything with raw eggs in it, like, there is always
some small amount of risk, you know, some small proportion
of eggs out there are going to be infected. Most
eggs are fine, but some are going to have some
in them, So you're always running that risk. And I guess,
I guess some of the difficulty comes from not just

(55:06):
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, you know,
to say like, Okay, I have this percent chance of
getting salmonila 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.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
But any way, that's It's the holiday season. It's about
it's about thinking about your your chances of survival, a
winter festivity that it is supposed to get you through
the darkest portion of the year and hopefully see about
the resurrection of the living world.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
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 it's fine now.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Last year, unstuff to blow your mind. We did an
entire episode looking at the major reward leg lamp from
a Christmas Story, the nineteen eighties holiday classic film, and
you know, looking at this leg shaped lamp and finding
predecessors to this in the ancient world. In a similar way,

(56:17):
I would like to at the close of this episode
on eggnog, consider the nineteen eighty nine holiday film Christmas Vacation,
which of course starred a great cast Chevy Chase, Beverly Dangelo,
Randy Quaid, among others. But there are at least a
couple of key scenes in this movie in which the

(56:37):
Griswold family drinks eggnog from glass goblets made in the
likeness of the Wally World moose. These are you can
actually buy these now, this is an actual product. But
in the movie they are 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.

(57:00):
Hold it by the ear and you sip your eggnog
that way, or you gulp it, as it happens to
be the case in some of the scenes.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
I imagine the moose face has to be facing out
or else the snout would sort of prevent you from
from getting it to your lips. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Yeah, you'd have to hold the glass in just the
right way. It's a ceremonial vessel. And I started looking
around as 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 in line with the manufacture of
artifacts in the ancient world. I would like to discuss

(57:36):
the ryton. This is generally spelled r hytn and it
is a style of head cup that appears in various
forms throughout the ancient world, according to Maha Abd el
Maghwud al Kadi in Forms and functions of rytons in
Ptotomaic Egypt. According to this author, they were likely Persian

(57:58):
in origin and were particularly pop they're during the Acaimenid
dynasty of five point fifty through three point thirty PCE.
You can look up images of the ryton and the
various versions of the ryton that appear in different times
and different cultures. One can roughly compare these to a
drinking horn like a you know, the hollowed horn of

(58:18):
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.
And we don't have time in this episode to really
dig into the variation and the different cultural takes in

(58:39):
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 ryton. In one form, you drink from the slender
part of the ryton it above one's head or roughly

(59:02):
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 handle that's a fixed to
the object, or even from sort of the horn itself.
In other forms, one drinks from the wide portion of
the ryton, so the whole thing is more like a
traditional goblet, except many of these designs would require you know,

(59:26):
gripping by the horns or by the or the antlers
that are on it. If there are antlers on it
and you might not be able to set it down,
it might not have a bottom to it.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
Wow, well that almost suggests a certain way to drink.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
Yeah, and again this would be highly ritual. So it's
not about setting your drink aside and then doing other things.
You're not going to do any paperwork. This is probably
part of some ritual. I don't know. You can easily
imagine some sort of warrior's feast, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
Right, you can't drink it while you're podcasting. It's maybe
to drink while people stand around you chanting drink.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
Right. So, there are various beautiful examples of the ryton,
but the one that really brought to my mind the
Wally World mug is the Stagshead Ryton, dating to four
hundred BCE. 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 antiquities

(01:00:26):
that were found in the possession of billionaire Michael Steinhardt.
You can look up articles on that again from just
last year. The item was apparently eluded 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 so

(01:00:48):
much concerning the twentieth century, though, it does seem to
be of ancient Greek manufacture, somewhere in the region of
the Black Sea, probably from the fifth century BCE. And
with this one, you'd apparently drink from the stag's lower
lip while holding it aloft, though not by the antlers,
as is visible in many photos of this particular artifact.

(01:01:09):
There's this curved handle behind the neck. Oh, I see it. Yeah,
So the question remains, is the Wally World mug a ryton? No,
it's not. No, it's not. Yes, it's first of all,
it's not horn shaped. It also doesn't You don't drink
from the moose's lips, so that alone wouldn't disqualify it
from being a ryton, as we previously noted, though I've

(01:01:33):
included a picture for you, Joe, of a ryton that
would involve you drinking from the wide portion as opposed
to the beast lips. You can sort of see, 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 of having a flat surface, flat bottom

(01:01:55):
on the bottom of your goblet, there is like the
head of a ram down there. Yeah, so you'd 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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Once again, the medium is the message here. This is
technology that shows that by necessity, shows you a way
to use it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Yeah. However, I will say the Wally World mug is
the likeness of a moosehead. It is the likeness of
an animal's head. It also is a ceremonial drinking vessel. Clearly,
the Grizwolds 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
with warrior images and images of battle, and we can

(01:02:39):
imagine the ceremonies they involve, probably aligned with some sort
of warrior ethos. We do see Clark Griswold drinking copious
amounts of nog while working cousin Eddie up for violence,
though curiously I had to go back. I was imagining this,
remembering this scene incorrectly, the scene where Clark Griswold is
throwing back a whole bunch of eggnog and talking about

(01:03:00):
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'd think you'd want him drinking
out of the moose. Maybe it's just because it's harder
to hold. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Maybe it's to show in a subtle way that Clark
is actually coldly calculating in the scene, and he's not
as drunk as it would suggest.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
Yeah, that's a whole topic for another time, trying to
figure out Clark Griswold. How do we feel about Clark Griswold,
about his motivations and his desires in Christmas Vacation.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Clark is neutral evil cousin cousin Randy Quaid, I'd say
chaotic neutral.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Yeah, I think so. All right, So again, not really
a Ryton in Christmas Vacation. But I think we might
well imagine a scene from an alternate dimension in which
there's a scene in Christmas Vacation in which Clark Griswold
holds aloft the mighty Wally the moose right on this
big glass moose head, or perhaps it's silver in this scenario,

(01:04:10):
a big silver moose head. Perhaps you grip it by
the antlers, and he's allowing cousin Eddie to then drink
nourishing noog from the lips of the moose before he
sends him out into glorious battle against the enemies of Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Bravo.

Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
All right, that's all I have.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
God bless us everyone.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Yes, I will say also, I fortunately finished my eggnog
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 eggnog, I should have an eggnog for
this listening experience. I hope that you too, were finished
before the abscesses were drained.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
Why are you saying that, Rob? Are you saying that?
Otherwise it would suggest the mental image that your glass
of creamy mixture is what's out coming out of.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
The Yes, that it is a goblet of holiday pus,
which you might be drinking from the glass ahead of
a moose, which doesn't help, or from the lips of
a moose right on.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
I guess Merry Christmas everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
All right, Yeah, we're going to 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 eggnog. We didn't really have
time to get into all the variations, but I know
there are some. I think I've had like a Puerto
Rican variation of eggnog before that was quite delightful. There's

(01:05:36):
so many different regional variations, family variations. Please write in.
We'd love to hear your take on all of this.
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 Mondays we do a
listener mail episode, and on Fridays we set aside most

(01:05:56):
serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
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 to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

(01:06:27):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
your favorite shows.