Culinary Compendium 23 - A December Drink List

Why ho-ho-hello there, and I am already regretting starting this so late, and after a couple drinks. I’m your Slowly Sobering Santa, Jon O’Guin, and it’s time for another Culinary Compendium, where we break down various complicated culinary lexicons, to give you a better insight into what the hell Gordon Ramsey is swearing about at any given time. Today’s topic: HEATED DRINKS FOR THE HOLI-DAYS. We’ll be breaking down your Glühwein, hot toddies, tom and jerry’s, and more. Good? Great. Now excuse me, while I Google how to put umlauts on the letter U, because I made the dumb call to include Germany.

EGGNOG

1.       Nog, with egg. Duh.

2.       Alright, so there’s actually a bunch of arguments on where the name “eggnog” comes from. Basic summary: there were a wide number of drinks that it could have been related to. Sometime between 1619 and 1775, the term “nog” was popular in some groups for “Strong beer” or “strong ale”. In other groups, the word “Nugg” referred to a beer heated with a hot poker. Some have claimed that the origin is actually an elision of “egg-n-grog”. The big agreement is that it’s an American term, with the British version of it being an “Egg Flip”, so it was probably some kind of communication error.

3.       A mixture of (nowadays), milk or cream with eggs, sugar, spices, and for adults, some alcohol, typically of a hard liquor. The drink was initially a riff on the POSSET, and contained no dairy, with the two kind of fusing together in the Industrial Revolution.

Oh, look, the Steampunk fans are here. This is my fault for mentioning fusion and the Industrial Revolution in the same sentence.

GLØGG

1.       Who invited Norway, damn it? I already have to deal with freaking Germany in a second. Ugh. Fine. Gløgg is, basically, the Nordic version of MULLED WINE, mostly notable for A: having slightly different spices involved (clove, cinnamon, cardamom and ginger…and sometimes citrus peel, raisins, or ALMONDS), and B: not needing to be wine. There are non-alcoholic ones, and ones where the base spirit is a hard liquor like rum. Indeed, the original version was harder liquor, carried by messengers and drunk to keep warm.  

GLÜHWEIN

1.       This only made the list because I’m currently in Leavenworth, and because I wanted EVEN MORE Gs and weird letters around the place. This is Germany’s version of MULLED WINE, which typically includes Star Anise, and sometimes vanilla pods. That’s it. The name means “Smoldering Wine”.

HOT COCOA

1.       Is this a prank? You know what the hell Hot Cocoa is.

2.       FINE. In case you don’t: Hot Cocoa is TECHNICALLY slightly different than Hot Chocolate, but almost no one cares about that. Both consist of chocolate or cocoa powder dissolved in hot water or milk. Boom. That’s it.

HOT TODDY

1.       What you call it when Boris Todbringer, Protector of the Drakwald, wielder of the Runefang Legbiter, and Beloved of Ulric, goes sunbathing.

Some jokes you just write for yourself to laugh at.

2.       An alcoholic drink that is essentially cocktail cough-syrup: a mixture of hot water, hard alcohol (typically whisky) and sweetener (traditionally honey). The idea is that the honey will help the drink coat your throat and soothe roughness, while the alcohol numbs it, and the hot water helps distribute the honey and warms you up. Many versions include spices like cinnamon and lemon juice (the lemon juice to cut through any phlegm, and to provide vitamin C.

3.       The drink’s name is an adaptation of an Indian palm wine, and became popular in part as an Irish doctor, Robert Todd, would prescribe it as a cure for light coughs or colds.

HOT BUTTERED RUM

1.       You ever read a recipe name, and know that it both has to be exactly what it claims to be, but also refuse to believe it’s what it says? Yeah, “hot Buttered Rum” is almost exactly what it says on the tin. Technically, it’s something close to a variant of the Hot Toddy, or a fusion of the Hot TODDY with the POSSET/EGGNOG. (some even suggest the invention of the Eggnog was simply from someone riffing on hot buttered rums)  One thing you’ve got to remember is, prior to the understanding of germ theory, we really didn’t get why alcohol (which has to boil its water for processing) was less likely to get us sick than normal water, so there’s a lot of variations on the same idea, because we drank a TON of alcohol. The average colonial American drank 5 shots of hard liquor PER DAY. Because, again: water isn’t safe to drink, but alcohol is.

2.       A mixture of rum, butter, hot water, sweetener, and warming spices. Popular in America as a mirror of the Toddy of Ireland/England. (probably due to greater access to Rum vs Whisky)

MULLED WINE

1.       Wine you’ve had some time to think about.

Ba-dum-tsh. Thank you. I’ll be here all month.
(alternate punchline: some jokes you write for NO ONE to laugh at.)

2.       Wine that has been sweetened, seasoned, and heated. The exact etymology is highly contested. An ancient Greek/Roman variant called Hippocras (or Ypocras) has existed since roughly the 10s or 20’s. Yeah, NO preceding century: around 20 AD.  Some have argued that Mulled Wine was in fact derived from Mulled Ale, itself a drink served at funeral banquets, called “mouldales”. Others point to how “mull” used to have a definition of “dirt” or “to crumble”, so it might refer to the spices. No one’s sure, but it’s fine, because no one agrees exactly how to make it either.

3.       “Traditional” English recipes include all the fruits and seasonings expected in BOTH Glogg and Gluhwein. France makes it with just wine, honey, cinnamon, and orange. Basically, people just have warm spices, sugar, and fruit, and they mess with wine (or, cider, or beer) until it tastes nice to them.

NEGUS

1.       That can’t be legal to write, can it?

2.       An old Ethopian word for King, which the New York Times full Crossword likes to drop every now and again when feeling spicy.

3.       A drink, named for, and I promise you I cannot make this up “Colonel Francis Negus of Dallinghoo”, a town in Suffolk England. It is, and you’ll be so fucking happy they make this distinction, “what if we made MULLED WINE like a HOT TODDY”? That’s it. It’s “the most common hot Christmas drink, cooked in a somehow more boring way.” It wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if not for the borderline offensive name, and the fact that it is weirdly popular in romantic literature: a LOT of characters in like, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, etc end up drinking one, because it was viewed as a restorative drink during the cold season for refined young women.

4.       The one cool thing about a Negus (still doesn’t feel good, even knowing it’s fine) is that it does note you can swap out port for the wine, meaning you’d get a sweeter and more alcoholic version.

POSSET

1.       “What if we made MULLED WINE, and then intentionally curdled milk in it”, Satan apparently asked one chilly afternoon in Hell. I hate all of this. I’m going to bed. Friday Jon’s got to handle this now.

2.       Okay, having slept on it, and reviewed the literature, while that pitch certainly isn’t fun for a modern-day reader, this is something of a situation where “food has marched on”. Yes, to us, “curdled” has a negative connotation, because we typically only encounter it with milk that’s gone bad, we should also remember it’s the first step to making most cheeses, and that, when done intentionally, there’s nothing WRONG with curdled milk. Hell, that’s just what cottage cheese is. So this can be read as a kind of attempt to use the curdling of milk to produce something like an alcoholic milkshake/ warm ice cream/flavored yogurt, all dishes we do understand, just with a less smooth texture because of the tools they had at the time.

Modern ones just look like Custard, so presumably that was kind of the texture they were aiming for.

TOM AND JERRY

1.       Not super common, but a favorite of some Leavenworth locals, the Tom and Jerry is an interesting cocktail: it was initially created, as far as anyone can tell, as something of a publicity stunt: in 1821, Pierce Egan, a popular writer on boxing, considered by some to be the father of modern sports journalism, started putting out a story, “Life in London”,  in monthly installments which was basically a kind of “London Travel Guide” meets “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle”: two friends (Tom and Jerry) just having a big couple days of partying, meeting rich people and poor people, and having fun how everyone does. The book was instantly fairly popular, and within a year, the author had written a play of the same story. He’d also created a special cocktail recipe…consisting of Eggnog with a ½ ounce of brandy in it, which he named after the play’s title: Tom and Jerry. From THERE, the drink was iterated on into…something else. A ‘modern’ Tom and Jerry consists of a kind of enriched meringue (like, you whip up egg whites, then fold back into them the egg yolks and sugar) mixed with hot milk and rum. A sort of midpoint between HOT BUTTERED RUM and EGGNOG.

2.       A cartoon show about a Cat and Mouse, respectively.

The mouse represents the brandy. (They’re actually completely unrelated.)

WASSAIL

1.       I already did a whole post about this, damnit.

2.       Ugh, fine. “wassail” is just MULLED Cider. That’s it. It has a cool name because of an old drinking ritual. (“Wassail comes from Old English (or maybe an Old Norse cognate) where it basically translates to “wish you well”, and was just a thing people would say to each other on the street. Eventually certain groups started using it as a sort of cheers: you’d say “wassail” to your friend, and they’d say “drinchail” to you. (“be well” and “Drink well”, respectively.) Then it became a holiday thing: “For the New Year, Be well” “And drink well!” (both drink).  So then you’d be ‘drinking wassails’ to each other (ie, toasting each other), and that got confused into the idea that you were literally drinking “wassails”, and so the drink got a new name.

3.       Like I said, it’s just hot cider with added spices. There’s some variants, like Lambswool. (where you dissolve baked apples into the mixture) but the basic idea is…well, basic. It’s hot cider with Pumpkin Spice.

AND THAT’S frankly more than we have time for. Before we close with the stingers,  to warn you all now: We will be taking the weeks of December 20th through January 1st off at the end of the month. We MIGHT do like, a little bonus post on the 22nd, but the idea is to give Jon 2 weeks where he’s not thinking about the site at all, in part so he can focus on getting OTHER parts of the operation up and operational, in part so he can have some family/friend time, and in part because he really wants a specific post number to line up on a specific date, so he can’t upload the 20th.   We assure you, it’s very important to him.

MONDAY: TOO MANY PIES. ALMOST A Pi OF PIES

THURSDAY: I DUNNO.

Title image provided by barnimages.com