Egg Nog Explained

It’s a classic holiday treat that nobody seems to be able to fully understand. You can make it yourself, or you can buy it at the store. You’ve probably been choking it down for the better part of your life, with no knowledge of what you were drinking or why you were drinking it. Just as you probably got tired of drinking it around the holiday season, and you were about to push it aside for the foreseeable future, you found out that adults put booze in it, and you were right back in it. Still, you probably had no idea what you were ingesting, and possibly throwing back up. Well, that’s about to change, because your friends at Holy Taco are about to give you the egg nog breakdown. Here’s a few egg nog talking points you can bore people with at your next Christmas party…

The Basic Ingredients

Basically, egg nog is just a mixture of eggs, milk, sugar, and usually some nutmeg. You can then add alcohol, obviously, if you want to make your aunt cry again this year. Rum is the most common alcoholic addition, but you can use any type of alcohol. Brandy would work well, too. Or whisky, or whatever you find under the sink. If you add enough sugar and nutmeg to the mixture, nobody will know or care!

There was also one particular ingredient found in the original, colonial recipes for egg nog — cocaine. The original recipe, found in “American Cookery,” which was the first American cookbook, calls for a dash of “thunder snow,” the native American term for cocaine. This would explain it’s intense popularity.*

What the hell is “nog?”

That’s the part that confuses everyone. Nothing else gets nog’d. There’s no pumpkin nog, or apple nog. No watermelon or grape nog. Just eggs. It’s called egg nog because that term is a variation of the original term for the drink which was “egg and grog,” grog meaning booze.

It originated in England, but was brought over with the early colonists who drank it at their office Christmas parties. Then they introduced it to the native Americans who died in large numbers because their systems couldn’t process the mixture.*

Why is it seasonal?

We’re not sure. We’ve got google just like you, and if you think you can answer this mystery better than us, go for it. Our guess would be the simple fact that refrigeration wasn’t a thing when milk and egg drinks were popular which means they would spoil quickly at room temperature so you didn’t have a whole lot of time to make it. Besides that, what kind of weirdo wants to drink a thick, warm dairy beverage in the summer. Gross. You wait until winter, you keep the eggs and the milk outside in the cold, bring them in, nog ‘em up as needed and you’re good to go.

Also, President George Washington declared it could only be consumed during the holidays because everyone loved it so much. Washington feared that year-round consumption of the drink would lead to over population and later, addiction.*

*Made that up.