Eggnog salmonella cocktail

Eggnog, like so many old fashioned cocktails

Is made with raw eggs.

Raw eggs give cocktails some viscosity and

Potentially some bubbles if you shake or whip the drink.

Eggnog is raw eggs, milk and/or cream, sugar and a healthy dose of brown liquor like brandy or rum. That healthy dose of liquor is not only conducive to good holiday cheer, it might also serve to make the drink healthier or at least less likely to have you writhing around on the floor of your bathroom all Christmas. Nobody really knows the origin of eggnog or the origin of its curious name. Written accounts of the drink first appear in 18th century Britain and America. Oxford English Dictionary says nog is an old East Anglian word for a kind of strong ale. So perhaps the drink was originally just raw egg in beer. On the other hand, nog is also a very old word referring to a kind of wooden peg and here in the Americas, nog came to refer to a kind of wooden mug that people would drink from, I would guess, because a mug is also a cylindrical shape like a peg.

Also in the Americas, rum came to be referred to kind of informally as grog. So if you thickened up some rum with a raw egg, you would be drinking egg in grog and you might serve it in a nog. Therefore, people have long argued that egg in grog in nog got squished into eggnog. But the famous linguist Ben Zimmer disagrees. He says there's just no textual evidence to support that explanation, amusing though it may be. He raises the possibility that nog might be derived from a Scottish word, nug, meaning ale warmed with a hot poker. I guess if you wanted a warm drink, but you did not have a fire safe vessel, you could warm your poker in the fire and then put it into the drink and it would go tssssss. Anyway, eggnog evolved into the sweet, rich dairy drink that we traditionally have at.

Christmas. There are several recipes attributed to founding US President George Washington, historians at Mount Vernon — Washington's plantation turned museum — they say these recipes are apocryphal. They may be real vintage recipes, but they have nothing to do with Washington. Let's assume this is a real vintage recipe, however. So we've got cream, milk, sugar, brandy, rye, rum and sherry. Separate the eggs so you can beat the whites before folding them in and then, check this, "set in a cool place for several days.". Lots of very old eggnog recipes tell you to age your eggnog before you drink it, to age it for days or even weeks. My hypothesis is this procedure might have been born of agricultural necessity.

In the days before climate controlled chicken coops, chickens generally stopped laying eggs in the winter, at least in cold climates. If you wanted to preserve some eggs for the winter, one option may have been to mix them with booze. I have no textual evidence to support my claim here. But it is a fact that ethanol is a preservative, and people might have simply noticed that aged eggnog also tended to taste better, hence this eggnog recipe, which I got from a microbiologist at Rockefeller University named Dr. Vincent Fischetti. He got it from his predecessor. Dr. Fischetti: When I started at Rockefeller about 60 plus years ago, one of the traditions in the lab was Rebecca Lancefield was a famous scientist at the time and passed away in the '80s, but as a famous scientist.

At Thanksgiving time, she would set up an eggnog. She would have a home recipe and we all got together and she would make the recipe in front of all of us and I carried on that tradition for the next 30 or 40 years. 

Lancefield's recipe.

Instead of whipping the egg whites, she just whipped the cream in order to get a froth. That's nice. That way you don't have to separate the eggs. But her first step is, "Beat eggs, add bourbon and rum slowly with stirring to prevent precipitation of egg proteins.".

You can tell this was written by a microbiologist. Dr. Fischetti: Precipitation means denaturation of the egg proteins and it just falls out of solution. So it's actually just globs of protein. Adam: I'm going to show you what that would look like and instead of the rum, I'm going to use Everclear because it's clear so you can see what's happening. Also, Everclear is 95% alcohol. So the effect is going to be all the more dramatic. The booze chemically cooks the egg white, instantly.

Ethanol disrupts the surface of the egg proteins, makes them fall out of solution and unfold, tangling and bonding with each other in this big coagulated mass. Heat does the same basic thing when you cook. If you mix the booze in slowly, you still denature the proteins, but at least you stop them from flocculating together in giant clumps. So let's make Dr. Lancefield's recipe. It's in the description and I've scaled it down. I'm not trying to liquor up a whole department. Whip a cup of cream, 237mL until you've got nice peaks but stop before it looks like cottage cheese.

Grab a bigger bowl and crack in two eggs — try not to bump the camera. Start beating those and then gradually drizzle in a cup and a half, 355 mL of any brown liquor mixture you want. I've got a cup or rum and half a cup of rye whiskey. Dr. Fischetti thinks this step is probably important — adding the booze directly to the eggs instead of mixing it in later. If there's any bacteria in, there we're probably killing a lot of them right now in short order. Once smooth, you can mix in the sugar — I like half a cup, 100g, but some people might like it sweeter. And then I've got another cup, 237mL of un-whipped cream, but you could use milk instead.

Last ingredient is the whipped cream, just get that mixed in and you can see how thick this mixture is. Part of that thickness is provided by the egg proteins that we chemically cooked. Transfer that into some sealable vessel, and that's it. Tastes amazing — tastes like an extremely boozy milk shake. But is there still some salmonella risk? Salmonella has been virtually eradicated from British eggs because the Brits vaccinate the chickens.

We don't do that here in the United States.

That said, American eggs are a lot

Safer nowadays than they were back in the 20th century when we had some big salmonella scares.

Still, if you're going to be serving old people or anyone who doesn't have a very good immune system, I think you should take the salmonella risk pretty seriously and this leads us to the last line in Dr.

Lancefield's recipe. Leave standing at least overnight with a lid slightly a jar in refrigerator. I assume, because the nog might off gas and if you sealed this really tightly, it could explode anyway. Anyway, she says serve after two to three weeks in the cold, Dr. Fischetti: We make it the week before Thanksgiving and then we have it for Thanksgiving and then everyone goes away for Thanksgiving recess and we just keep it in the cold room until Christmas and then we have it for our Christmas party and actually it's better at Christmas than it was in Thanksgiving, Adam: And it's probably safer after it ages.

Dr. Fischetti is running a bacteriology lab there, so he's got vials of salmonella just sitting around and one year they decided to do a little experiment. Dr.

Fischetti: We made the recipe and we spiked it with salmonella. So we added quite a bit of salmonella to the eggnog and then we took samples. We put it away in the cold room as we would do normally. Adam: On the same day they mixed it up, there were still live salmonella in there. Then they checked after three days and the population of live salmonella was significantly reduced. They checked at three weeks and it was gone. There was no bacteria left after three weeks. Booze basically does the same thing to the bacteria that it does to the egg proteins.

Dr. Fischetti: It denatures the membrane. The bacteria has a cell wall and a membrane and the alcohol will just denature the membrane and just kill the organism. Adam: So here's my freshly mixed batch. I'm just curious how stable the foam is going to be over time. So I'm marking the level there. Here we are after three weeks in the fridge and while the mixture has separated a bit, the level is still the same. No cream bubbles popped.

That's surprisingly stable. Exactly Which element of the mixture has settled to the bottom? Well, let's use a straw to take a core sample and taste the tiny bit that comes out of the straw first. Yep, that is booze, straight booze at the bottom. But the cream on top also tastes really boozy. So everything in there is in contact with alcohol and that's good if we want to kill bacteria. I'm just shaking that to get everything homogenous again before I drink it and as Dr. Fischetti said, the aged product tastes a lot more mellow and complex. All kinds of chemical reactions occur when alcohol mixtures age.

Insanely delicious.

But is it safe? Safe enough for me.

I'm going to drink all of this. But it's important to remember that that experiment they did at Rockefeller was not fit for scientific publication. Ideally, you would want to repeat the experiment several times. You'd want to maybe change up the variables a little bit, the time and the temperature. That would be the only way to prove that this is safe. You'd also want to find the minimum amount of booze necessary to kill any salmonella.