From the Vault: Goblet of Eggnog

In this classic 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, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb. We're mostly off this week for the holidays,
so we have a vault episode for you today. This
is going to be one from a few years back.
This is this one originally published twelve fifteen, twenty twenty two.
It is our episode on the invention of eggnock. So

(00:27):
let's drink up.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. 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

(01:03):
it would be to turn back. So once more, we
have a holiday episode for you. It's actually going to
be our third installment in our Holiday Invention series, where
we more or less give the invention treatment to various
holiday decorations, traditions, and toys. This year we're going to
be looking in earnest at eggnog.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
Is eggnog an invention. Sure, we can stretch the definition.
I think that's okay.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
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 it's one

(01:51):
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 egnog 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 will generally buy a
carton of almond nog each year, largely for our son

(02:14):
because he gets super into it. And if I have
a chance to visit a like an upscale cocktail place
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 Sippings Santa
festivities at beach Bumberr's Latit Tude twenty nine. They also

(02:36):
have pop ups all over the place, and they'll generally
have at least one holiday teaki beverage on there that
is at least eggnog esque.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
In form I'm picturing piles of crushed or pellet ice
with kind of a frothy, creamy gryme about them and
some nutmeg sprinkled over top.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Oh yeah, the nutmeg is will 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 sos t Bar, and I enjoyed a
frozen take on a classic eggnog. Generally a rich drink
though so once twice three times per year, Max. That's
generally enough from me, uh huh. Now. Before we came

(03:21):
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 4 (03:38):
Wait, is this full booze eggnog?

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Or well you might well presume that, but I couldn't
possibly comment, Yes, creamy, rich, hint of nutmeg, beautiful.

Speaker 4 (03:53):
I have no eggnog in the house. A cute cute
Joe Peshi 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 peshe in Home Alone is correct. I found the
idea revolting, not just revolting, I think, I think I

(04:17):
probably found it borderline nauseating to think of a drink
made out of eggs. Something changed over the years. Now
I find it quite delightful.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
So was the eggs that threw you off?

Speaker 4 (04:29):
Yeah, well you're gonna drink eggs?

Speaker 3 (04:30):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (04:31):
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 baking and sweet contexts, but that's not how

(04:52):
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 3 (05:02):
I can understand that. I mean, especially even the name
is a bit potentially off putting. It's very forward with
the egg. What you were about to drink contains eggs,
and then the nog also can throw one for a curve.
I do like some of the archaic spellings of eggnog
that I've encountered researching this episode. Oftentimes the way we
encounter it now it's egg n og, but some of

(05:24):
these other spellings will be egg n ogg. I like
the double the double g's occurring in both parts of
the word.

Speaker 4 (05:32):
That's just symmetry. That's good branding.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
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 points as a civilization where you
can have something that is identifiable as a nog without

(05:57):
the presence of egg or dairy. But historically this is
the realm from which this beverage arises.

Speaker 4 (06:02):
Right, So you're 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 3 (06:11):
Yeah, though, I guess it's even more like some people
get up in arms, especially the dairy industry. I know
about things that are not milk calling themselves milk. And
even more to the point, I guess something like a
soy nog or an almond nog is going to have
neither eggs nor dairy, and so it is even further removed.
But yet it's still very much in the spirit of
of of the classic nog. So I think it more

(06:33):
than qualifies.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
Yeah, nog is a thick, creamy, sweet drink.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yes, it's a state of mind. It's it's 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

(06:59):
can pick up on the history of the American cocktail.
This is a great book. It cites, among many others,
the legendary professor Jerry Thomas, who lived eighteen thirty through
eighteen eighty five, the New Orleans bartender who wrote the
Seminole Bartender's Guide and helped popularize cocktail drinking in general.
Were go into more depth on this in an older

(07:19):
episode or episodes that we did together on Mixology.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
I think we ended up talking about absentth a lot
in those.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
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 Wondriche includes a recipe from

(07:50):
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
Wandritch includes a quote from this is an eighteen seventy

(08:12):
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 4 (08:26):
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 3 (08:39):
Yes, yes, okay, yeah. The milk would would also be
be an important part of this. 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 quote

(09:04):
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 quote

(09:26):
it is a favorite of all seasons, he was certainly
overstating the case.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
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,

(09:53):
as the Simpsons proposed, you equally whip up a cauldron
of corn nog.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
Cornnog sounds a delicious like it brings to mind like
corn puddings.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
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 or corn nog whatever, what
have you? Any nogs? My source here is a December

(10:25):
two thousand 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.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Before Huh Crazy.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
So here's what Ben Zimmer says about nog. The word
nog first shows up as a regional term in England,
specifically 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 there referred to a type

(11:01):
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 Prideaux, who described quote
a bottle of old strong beer, which in this country
they call nog. So nog is high gravity beer. It's

(11:21):
strong stuff. But to take one step back, why would
the East Anglians call strong beer nog. Zimmer identifies a
couple of hypotheses here. One is that it comes from
the word noggin, which we today think of as antiquated
slang for head for your head. But before that nogin

(11:42):
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
instead of the mug itself. And we do that kind
of metonymy with words today like did you have one? Oh,
I drank two glasses. You're not saying you literally drank

(12:03):
the glass. The glasses mean the wine inside the glass, right.
But another idea is that the word nog for strong
beer comes from a Scottish word nug or nuged ale,
which means ale that you heat up by sticking a
hot poker in it, which is funny enough to imagine
in itself, but I can also see how that would

(12:24):
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 3 (12:34):
Hmmm, yeah, this is this is interesting. It brings to
mind you 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 4 (12:53):
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.

(13:16):
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 issle 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 3 (13:35):
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 4 (13:45):
And Zimmer reports that a Maryland clergyman named Jonathan Bouchet
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,

(14:08):
fog DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. This
is nog with two g's at night hot suppings and
at mid day grog my palate can regale. So you
see the context here is fully alcoholic grog refers to
a spirit or alcoholic beverage. Then there's that line, fog

(14:28):
DRAMs in the morn or better still eggnog. A dram
usually refers to a small drink of whiskey, and according
to Miriam Webster, fog DRAMs are quote DRAMs resorted to
on the pretense of their protecting from the danger of fog.

(14:48):
I'm sorry, boss, I had to have another whiskey before
work or the fog could have killed me on the
way here.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
All right, Well, yeah, this is making sense. Is an
early morning drink though, because you get your your fog
protection you get a couple of eggs in there, maybe
you know this is a breakfast that you're drinking down exactly.

Speaker 4 (15:08):
So Bouchet may have written that in seventy seventy five.
It's hard to say for sure, but according to Zimmer,
the earliest at rock solid references to eggnog where we
know the date of their publication, appear in a handful
of newspapers in the year seventeen eighty eight, as you
mentioned earlier. Now one is a March seventeen eighty eight

(15:28):
report in the 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,

(15:49):
a glass of eggnog, and another of brandy sling.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah, is this what newspapers were back in the day.
Did you have like a gluttony page where you're like,
what's everybody overeating in New Jersey?

Speaker 4 (16:00):
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,

(16:23):
punch and eggnog meat instantly ensues.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
A quarrel, there's wisdom to that. I think.

Speaker 4 (16:30):
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 3 (16:38):
You know, we were looking back at a time when
drinking was a little more robust throughout the country. I think.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I love the fact that newspapers
not only used to report on what some guy aded
a form, but also what gave me an upset tummy.
So it sounds like an alcohol beverage known as eggnog
was in common parlance in the colonies and the young
United States in the late eighteenth century. But Zimmer also

(17:10):
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 was

(17:32):
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 sence. Okay,
He's like, we're so drunk, I bet none of you
can write four lines of poetry that will make sense

(17:53):
and rhyme. So what did they come up with? While
one guy belts out the following, 'tis eggnog, whose golden
streams dispense far richer treasures to the Ravish sense, the
muse from wine derives a transient glare, but Eggnog's drafts
afford her solid fare. So move over, wine. The muses

(18:16):
are no longer interested in you now they will only
be singing to people who are chug and agnog.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Eggnog doesn't seem to have a personification, though, like there's
no like satyr of eggnog.

Speaker 4 (18:28):
Right the Dionysus of eggnog.

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, I suppose it's you know, he was before its time.
I think he would have approved of egnog, especially based
on these historical references to agnog.

Speaker 4 (18:40):
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 seventy ninety five, ninety six and ninety seven by
an Irish writer and explorer named Isaac Weld, And this

(19:01):
passage actually reminds me of earlier when you were citing
I think David Wondrich who said that sometimes people from
Europe might encounter eggnog and think, oh, you know, what
crimes they're committing against 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. But

(19:22):
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

(19:42):
hearty draft each. According to custom of eggnog, a mixture
composed of new milk, eggs, rum, and sugar beat up together.
So eggnog it should be heavy, sweet, exploding with alcohol,
drunk in large quantities in the morning before setting out
on a long journey.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
Yeah, this is I mean it really it forces you
to rethink egnog because I think a lot of people
are probably like like me, You grew up exposed to again,
the grocery store eggnog, and there's this kind of sense
that eggnog is this drink for everybody. Eggnog's this drink
for kids. And as you get older, then you're perhaps
in a situation where you can have the eggnog with

(20:25):
something added to it, eggnog plus you know, if you like.
But this is but 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 4 (20:41):
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 egnog. I've
seen some serious day out cast upon its origins, like

(21:01):
whether 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,

(21:23):
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,

(21:45):
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 3 (21:55):
Yes, it definitely is This is definitely the recipe he
would use, and it is quite lightful. 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

(22:17):
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 egnog 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

(22:40):
predecessors that, Yes, even if egnog is something that emerges
in North America, there are at least things not unlike
egnog that one can encounter, say in at least late
medieval and post medieval Europe.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
Oh, yes, some gorgeous textures to imagine.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yes, 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 Hooden or Hoden Horse of Kent for the

(23:23):
Monster Facts 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 mulled cider ale or wine and spices.

(23:44):
But then there is the tradition of the passet posset
the passet. Yes, The Smithsonian magazine website has a nice
article about this titled Past the Posset colon the Medieval
Eggnog by Lisa Brahman, and according to this article, it
apparently dates back to late medieval Europe, and it looks
like some of the examples come to us from the

(24:07):
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 posets of the guards outside Duncan's quarters.

Speaker 4 (24:23):
Oh I forgot about that.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
I had as well. When the author here brings it up,
I'm like, oh, yeah, I do remember that line vaguely.
But you encounter so many archaic courts if you're reading
or performing Shakespeare that you can't stop to wonder. Overall,
it's enough to be like, okay, this means drinking vessel. Okay,
what's the next strange word that doesn't quite register for me?
Let me translate that one in my head. But this

(24:48):
is You can actually look up examples of this vessel
online the pauset, this posset, and you'll find that some
of the main examples of this it looks curiously like
an ornate tea pot with handles on both sides, a
wide lidded aperture at the top, with a with a
with a lid on top, and the stem for it,

(25:10):
you know, like that like a t kettle. It feeds
from the bottom of the vessel rather than from the
middle or the top of the vessel.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
The reason for this design, according to Brayman, is that
you can drink directly from the stem to get at
the liquid contents of the of the of the liquid
it contains, but also you can take the lid off
the top and go at the top of it with
a spoon, because basically you're gonna have a mixture of things.
You're gonna have a fluid beneath and kind of a

(25:41):
chonky chonky, creamy perhaps cheesy layer at the top.

Speaker 4 (25:47):
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 3 (25:57):
Yes, the way that Brayman describes it as 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

(26:19):
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,

(26:43):
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

(27:04):
plastic straw and spoon combined so that you can do both.
They did not have this technology in the late medieval
period to my knowledge. Therefore they had to use a posset.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
Well, you know, it is the same principle as a straw,
which I don't find unusual. But I have to say,
it is funny to imagine somebody like drinking out of
the stem of a tea kettle.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
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

(27:45):
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

(28:05):
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 to it, not like provolone right right now. I
should also mentioned there are more contemporary pauset dishes, such

(28:26):
as you often see recipes for something called a lemon pauset,
but this seems somewhat more refined compared to what is
described here. This is not something you drink out of
a strange tea kettle. It's something you spoon out of
a dish. But is it eggnog? Well, in many ways,
if not most ways, no, But it also sounds like
the sort of thing that if you were a time

(28:48):
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 cover the posset and be like, oh, well this
will work, this will do. Now my holiday is complete.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
Yeah, it's a liquidy egg and milk or egg and
cream type thing.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
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, that
this could feed into the very American traditions that would,
according to Thomas, bring about the American eggnog.

Speaker 4 (29:26):
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 3 (29:46):
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot more material once you were
a certain point. And wonderch 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
cock tails, and this is also somewhat how Jerry Thomas
and the people of his day would have classified them.

(30:06):
One of the things that really amazed me about all this, though,
is that Wondridge 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, etc. Now, now I should point

(30:27):
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,
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,

(30:48):
though to be sure, you probably won't find them on
just random restaurant cocktail menus, Like I don't know if
Chili's offers an egg drink.

Speaker 4 (30:57):
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 have that have egg whites in them.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah. 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, allspice.
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

(31:30):
New Orleans drink that contains gin, simple syrup, lemon juice,
lime juice, egg white, heavy cream, orange flower water, and
club soda. It's one that famously requires a great deal
of shaking. 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 are to pass it
off to another bartender to continue shake shaking it. But

(31:52):
it is also a delightful drink. But yeah. He Wonderage
points out though that even though we only have so
many 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 were
as popular as eggnog drinks are during the holiday year round.

(32:18):
So just imagine, imagine a world in 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 it.
You get my point.

Speaker 4 (32:34):
That's that sounds like a magical time, a very rich,
rich time.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yeah, 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.

(33:00):
You can imagine, perhaps you know, there are new fads
in cocktails, new ingredients are more readily available for cocktails,
and then there's this whole issue of salmonella.

Speaker 4 (33:12):
Salmonella concerns, of course, remain relevant to this day, and
we'll come back to those in just a few minutes.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
Now.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Wondrich also points out there was a great deal of
variation when it came to eggnog 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 is if there's no secret, if the recipe is

(33:38):
well known, you're going to end up having deviations anyway.
For instance, anywhere you go today the my Thie recipe,
there's no telling what a restaurant will actually serve you
if you order a my Tie, even though the original
recipe is very well known at this point, or it's
very easily obtained if you have a desire to seek
it out. But these regional differences in eggnog, this would

(34:03):
really make people emotional. A Wondred 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 4 (34:17):
Oh 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 3 (34:30):
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 Is It Stems? It Stems from General Thomas Green

(34:53):
of the Army of the Texas Republic from eighteen forty three.
The recipe serves about one hundred and sixty for seven
gallons of mez cow, seven gallons of donkey milk, thirty
dozen eggs, and a large loaf of sugar.

Speaker 4 (35:11):
I love that sugar used to come in loaves.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Yeah, well, 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 4 (35:26):
I've never tasted donkey milk. I don't even know what
that would be like.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
I 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
market for donkey milk anyway. Well, Wondrich roughly translates the

(35:55):
recipe for modern drinkers in that book. He of course
says you can use cow mil instead of donkey milk,
and he also recommends grating a little chocolate on top.
So Jerry Thomas apparently chronicled six different eggnog recipes, and
wonder Wich includes recipes for three of them in his book.
Roughly speaking, these are the contents of these three that

(36:17):
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 then there's General Harrison's agnog. This is
ninth American President, William Henry Harrison, and this was said

(36:39):
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 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

(37:02):
based aggnog and vote for me? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (37:05):
That was him saying like, I'm just a you know,
a hard working frontiersman. I'm not one of these elites.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
Yeah, but I don't know. I mean, I appreciate hard cider,
but this sounds horrific. I don't think I would I
would want any part of this. So General Harrison, no,
thank you.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
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

(37:44):
with raw sewage.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
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 had tended where he quote
drank freely of iced water and chilled milk. According to

(38:06):
biographer K. 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. But I cut most of this out because

(38:30):
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 4 (38:39):
And probably plenty of raw sewage.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Is it time for salmonella?

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Oh yeah, that's a great transition. So eggs and salmonilla.
Salmonilla remains probably the main reason we have reservations about
raw egg based food and drinks today. Salmonella is a
genus of bacteria named not after salmon the fish, but
after an American veterinarian named Daniel Elmer Salmon. Though it

(39:16):
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

(39:37):
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 born illnesses, often characterized by fever, diarrhea,
severe stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, and headache. And because salmonella

(40:03):
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 salmonellosis in humans as well. Now, on

(40:27):
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

(40:49):
may be different today. If so, it's 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

(41:11):
will kill just about anything instantly. Also, you know, even
lower temperatures, if held for a sufficient amount of time,
will be enough 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 with

(41:33):
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. This

(41:57):
is a study published in the Lancet in nineteen seven
by Steer at All called person to person spread of
Salmonella typhimurium after a hospital common source outbreak. So the
abstract reads, in September nineteen seventy three, diarrhea caused by
Salmonella typhemurium developed in thirty two people in a main hospital.

(42:21):
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 had had direct

(42:43):
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 typhemurium 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 infections to

(43:07):
others who didn't even touch the nog. 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 story
is a seventy two year old man showed up at

(43:29):
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 did
a culture of the pus and it revealed the presence

(43:49):
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 gastrointestinal symptoms, and the authors say that
there had been recent cases of salmonilla infection related to eggs,

(44:10):
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, using a recipe

(44:31):
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 a secondary infection

(44:52):
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. Salmonella

(45:14):
in 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 in teroditis is

(45:36):
destroyed 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

(45:56):
you mix up a bunch of raw eggs and you
just drink that, that definitely is putting you at risk.
But if you put alcohol in the eggnog, surely that
would be safe.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
Right.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Doesn't alcohol kill germs?

Speaker 3 (46:09):
Yeah? And we're talking a lot of alcohol in some
of these recipes.

Speaker 4 (46:14):
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

(46:35):
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

(46:55):
pathogenic microorganisms in there and see what happens. 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 strains

(47:19):
Basillus sirius, 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 species
they use decreased by more than three log base ten

(47:43):
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 micro organisms increased three log ten units.
Then they say had four degrees celsius. So I think
this would be simulating refrigerator temperatures. The decrease of pathogenic

(48:06):
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.
But in this study, the presence of seven percent straight

(48:27):
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 3 (48:41):
I'm pretty sure this recipe for egnog that they used
is the doctor cushion catheter, right, recipe for agnog with
all of these added diseases.

Speaker 4 (48:50):
M 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.

(49:12):
It was done in the late two thousands by microbiologists
at the at Rockefeller University named Vince Faschetti and Raymond
Schuck 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 her

(49:36):
original eggnog recipe. She had worked at Rockefeller University decades earlier.
Apparently 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 that the alcohol

(49:57):
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 knog, but they deliberately spiked it once again

(50:18):
with salmonilla. They just you can watch a 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 various stages

(50:39):
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 salmony. Just huge boom, millions of bacteria. Disgusting.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
You can need your spoon and your poset for that
one ugh.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
Egg plus salmonella 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 salmonella plus alcohol, but one day after mixing,
still plenty of salmonilla, but less than the one taken

(51:20):
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

(51:41):
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

(52:03):
kind of spirit comes through in a lot of the
other sources I've seen talking about whether alcohol will render
your eggnog safe, because it seems clear there's evidence that
at least in some cases, even if you got unlucky
enough and got a contaminated egg, given enough alcohol and
enough time, the nog would probably be safe. But there

(52:24):
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,

(52:46):
or they also recommend cooking the eggs basically 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

(53:08):
to kill any possible bacterial content before you add the
other ingredients. So personally, I don't know exactly where we
are left here. I will say it looks like some
experiments do show that alcohol content will at least often,
maybe not always, but will at least often neutralize the
main bacteria that people are worried about, meaning salmonilla, given

(53:32):
enough alcohol and enough time. And I will say that
I also, just speaking for myself, not giving advice to
other people, have personally drunk eggnog made in this way
with raw eggs but with lots of alcohol content, and
personally I felt fine about it. But it also looks
like some experts still have concerns that this might not

(53:53):
always work, and caution that if you want to make
sure you're safe, you should cook your eggs or use
a pasteurized product.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
I mean this is also enough to make one rethink
eating raw cookie dough and so forth.

Speaker 4 (54:06):
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 salmonella
in them, So you're always running that risk. And I guess,
I guess some of the difficulty comes from not just

(54:27):
whether or not you will accept the risk, but from
not knowing exactly how risky it is. Like you can't
come up, you don't have a number, you know, to
say like, Okay, I have this percent chance of getting
salmonilla 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 3 (54:47):
But in a way, that's It's the holiday season. It's
about it's about thinking about your chances of survival. A
winter festivity that is supposed to get you through the
darkest portion of the year and hopefully see about the
resurrection of the living world.

Speaker 4 (55:05):
That's quite beautifully put. But on the other hand, I'll
just say, like, you know, if you're not your yeah,
just cook your eggs or just use the past yourized thing.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
I mean, it's fine now. Last year unstuff to blow
your mind. We did an entire episode looking at the
major award 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

(55:35):
ancient world. In a similar way, 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

(55:56):
key scenes in this movie in which the Griswold family
drink 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

(56:17):
a big droopy moose snout on the front. You hold
it by the ear and you sip your eggnog that way,
or you gulp it, as it happens to be the
case in some of the scenes.

Speaker 4 (56:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Yeah. 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 the ryton. This is generally spelled r hytn and

(57:02):
it is a style of head cup that appears in
various forms throughout the ancient world, according to Mara Abd
el Maghwud al Kadi in Forms and functions of rytons
in Ptotomaic Egypt. According to this author, they were likely
Persian in origin and were particularly popular during the Acaimenid
dynasty of five point fifty through three point thirty PCE.

(57:26):
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 two a
drinking horn like you know, the hollowed horn of a beast,
but the design and function here is a little more involved.
So imagine a drinking horn in which the slender part
of the horn, the tapering part of the horn, is

(57:48):
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 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.

(58:13):
And there are essentially two types of ryton. In one form,
you drink from the slender part of the ryton, holding
it above one's head or roughly you know, above one's
head or at least parallel with one's head by either
twin handles on the side, or from some other kind
of of handle that's a fixed to the object, or

(58:34):
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, 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

(58:55):
not have a bottom to it.

Speaker 4 (58:58):
Wow, well that that almost suggests a certain way to drink.

Speaker 3 (59:03):
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, etc.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
Right, you can't drink it while you're podcasting. It's maybe
to drink from while people stand around you chanting drink Right.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
So there are various beautiful examples of the ryton, but
the one that really brought to my mind the Wally
World mug is the Stag's Head 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

(59:47):
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 actly when the
looting occurred, other than sometime during the twentieth century during
a time of unrest, which that only narrows it down

(01:00:08):
so much concerning the twentieth century, though it does seem
to be of ancient Greek manufacturer somewhere in the region
of the Black Sea, probably from the fifth century 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.

(01:00:30):
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 though that alone wouldn't
disqualify it from being a ryton. As we previously noted, though,

(01:00:54):
I've 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

(01:01:15):
bottom 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 4 (01:01:29):
Once again, the medium is the message here. This is
technology that shows that by necessity, shows you a way
to use it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Yeah. However, I will say the Wally World mug is
the likeness of a moose head. It is the likeness
of an animal's head. It also is a ceremonial drinking vessel. 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

(01:02:00):
imagine the ceremonies they involve, probably a ligne 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

(01:02:20):
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 4 (01:02:38):
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 3 (01:02:46):
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 4 (01:02:59):
Clark is neutral, evils cousin Randy Quaid. I'd say chaotic neutral.

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
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 Ryton, this big
glass moose head or perhaps it's silver in this scenario,

(01:03:31):
a big silver moose head. Perhaps you grip it by
the antlers, and he's allowing cousin Eddie to then drink
nourishing nod from the lips of the moose before he
sends him out into glorious battle against the enemies of Christmas. Bravo.
All right, that's all I have.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
God bless us everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Yes, I will say also, I fortunately finished my egg
nog before we got to the draining of abscesses, so
hopefully that calibrates the podcast episode for anyone out there
who's like, oh, well, Rob's having an eggnog. I should
have an eggnog for this listening experience. I hope that
you too, were finished before the abscesses were drained.

Speaker 4 (01:04:12):
Why are you saying that, Rob?

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
Are you saying that?

Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
Otherwise it would suggest the mental image that your glass
of creamy mixture is what's out coming out of the abscess.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
Yes, that it is a goblet of holiday puss, which
you might be drinking from the glass ahead of a moose,
which doesn't help, or from the lips of a moose.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Right on.

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
I guess Merry Christmas everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
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

(01:04:56):
so many different regional variations. Familytions, 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 serious

(01:05:17):
concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.