I like eggnog. I'm a nog kinda guy. Like to get all noggish. As a kid my holidays were accompanied by eggnog in a half-gallon carton produced by a local dairy called Halo Farms. They operated a barn-like storefront on Spruce Street in Trenton, with a packaging plant in back of it. One wall of the store's interior had been replaced with a floor-to-ceiling sheet of Plexiglas through which I could watch the encartonment (ha! new word!) of whatever they were running through the stainless steel production line that day: milk, cream, half and half, orange juice, iced tea, or one of several different colors of juice-style drinks produced, no doubt, by exotic juice-style cows. Every December they'd package eggnog, and I'd watch an endless line of festive green and red cartons soldier under the nog nozzles on their way to the sealer. Good stuff: thick and noggy. Nog nog nog! Nog.
Anyway. This year, I decided to make it myself, for no particular reason other than a certain boldness imparted by the smashing success of my Thanksgiving efforts. I was uncertain about it at first, not knowing whether I'd have time in the midst of replicating that Thanksgiving dinner and calling it Christmas dinner. I even bought a quart from the grocery store as backup, just in case. However, I became determined to produce my own when I saw that every brand of eggnog on the local shelves had high fructose corn syrup as its second or third ingredient. I don't like HFCS. It's weird and leaves slime in the back of my throat and mutates babies. It does not belong in eggnog. I don't know whether Halo Farms used it, but I doubt it. That was quite awhile ago, before the corn lobby began telling us that we should put corn in everything we eat, fuel our cars with it, and use it to enhance our mutual sexual pleasure. Monocrop craptacularity!
The recipe is simple: eggs. Lots of them, separated. Also, cream. Milk, sugar, vanilla extract, nutmeg, and, of course, some sort of booze, or more than one sort if you're so inclined. I used brandy, but not as much as the recipe called for, so that it wouldn't interfere with the Southern Comfort my mother likes to add to her own glass. I eliminated the dark rum entirely because she thinks it ruins everything, especially Coke.
Some recipes call for mixing some of the ingredients over low heat in a saucepan, but the one I used was all about the beating of cold ingredients and the folding of a bowl of stiff-peaked cream and another bowl of well-abused egg whites into yet a third bowl of thick yolks and sugar.
It was fantastic. And still is, because I made approximately eight billion gallons of it. Frothy! According to Wikipedia, it's supposed to be frothy. The big pot of it I made has a pale top layer of very light, almost meringue-like foam about three inches thick. You plunge the ladle through that, and then the familiar rich, yellow liquid burbles up. If I hadn't decided to make eggnog myself, I might have gone to my grave thinking that eggnog was just some sort of thick, nog-flavored cream without the slightest bit of froth. Terrible, just terrible.
I drank a bit of the store-bought eggnog yesterday, and after a couple of glasses of my own this afternoon, I decided to try another swig from the carton for comparison's sake.
Oh. My. Cthulhu.
I could taste the weirdness of the corn syrup. The dingy flavor of the spray-dried egg yolks. The odd tang of glycerides, both mono and di. The squeak of the anatto (for color, you know). Before I'd tasted my homemade nog, the store-bought had seemed fine. Not as good as Halo Farms, but okay. Now, I tasted eggnog "notes," but it was mostly an anemic imitation. Something you'd find at 7-11, like artificially eggnog-flavored Yoo-Hoo or Nestlé SportsNog Xtreme!
A similar thing happened when I discovered Tito's handmade vodka. After that, Absolut tasted like kerosense, and I never drank it again.
Next year, I'm going to try one of the recipes that involves a bit of heat. As good as this eggnog is, it's not quite as thick as I'd like it to be, and using a bit of heat on yolks and milk will produce a light custardy type of thing, so I'll have a thicker nog underneath that top layer of foam.
It's one AM now, officially Christmas Day in my part of the world. I hope you and yours are well and happy and relatively un-snowbound, because it's a Holiday and that's when you say that sort of thing to people you don't know and have never seen. And if it's just Thursday for you, well, you know, whatever. Have some eggnog anyway. Put a lot of bourbon in it.
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