Eggnog: How a Medieval Posset Became a Christmas Classic

Eggnog is a British drink that became American, and a hot drink that became cold. Both changes happened for practical reasons, and both are visible in the relatives it left behind across Europe.

The medieval posset

The ancestor is the posset: hot milk deliberately curdled with wine or ale, sweetened, and spiced with whatever the household could afford.

It was drunk in England from the medieval period onwards, and it served two purposes at once. It was a warming nightcap, and it was medicine. Possets were prescribed for colds, fevers and sleeplessness well into the seventeenth century, and elaborate covered posset pots survive in museum collections, some of them very fine, which tells you something about how seriously the drink was taken.

Eggs entered the picture as the recipe developed, thickening the drink into something closer to a custard. What emerged was rich, warming and expensive: milk, eggs, sugar and spice were all costly, and the wine or brandy used to fortify it more so.

That expense matters for what happened next. In Britain, an egg-and-dairy drink fortified with imported spirit was a drink for people with money.

Crossing the Atlantic

In colonial America the economics reversed.

Farms kept their own cows and hens, so milk, cream and eggs were ordinary rather than luxurious. Rum, arriving through the Caribbean trade, was considerably cheaper than the brandy, sherry or Madeira used in England. A drink that had been a restricted pleasure at home became something a household could make in quantity.

It also became a drink of hospitality. Making a bowl of eggnog for visitors was an ordinary act of welcome in a way that a posset in England had never been, and the association with Christmas visiting followed from that.

Recipes attributed to eighteenth-century American figures circulate widely, most famously one credited to George Washington. Those attributions should be treated with some caution, as drink recipes attach themselves to famous names easily, but they do reflect a genuine and well-documented enthusiasm for the drink in early America.

Becoming a Christmas institution

Two things fixed eggnog to Christmas specifically.

The first is seasonal logic. It is rich, heavy and warming, which suits December and nothing else. Nobody wants a glass of custard in July.

The second is the nineteenth-century codification of Christmas itself. The same Victorian process that turned mulled wine from a winter drink into a Christmas drink did the same to eggnog on the other side of the Atlantic, attaching a fixed set of foods and drinks to a fixed set of days.

By the twentieth century the commercial version had arrived: cartons of ready-made eggnog on supermarket shelves from November, with the alcohol left out and added at home. That is how most people now meet it, which is a shame, because a homemade one is a substantially better drink.

Christmas Eggnog

The full version, made properly: a silky custard of egg yolks, sugar, milk and double cream, spiked with dark rum and bourbon and finished with freshly grated nutmeg. It needs four hours of chilling, which is the main reason people buy the carton instead. Christmas Eggnog

Why it never travelled back

Eggnog is oddly rare in modern Britain, given that the drink started there. The posset died out, the Americanised version never came home, and what filled the gap was mostly imported from elsewhere.

The snowball, which became a British Christmas fixture in the twentieth century, is built on Dutch advocaat rather than on any surviving English tradition. Britain replaced its own egg drink with someone else’s.

The relatives worth knowing

The European cousins kept the heat that eggnog lost, and several are better drinks.

Advocaat

The Dutch version, and the closest living relative of the original posset: egg yolks, sugar and brandy whisked over gentle heat until thick, then chilled and served in a small glass with cocoa dusted over it. Thick enough to eat with a spoon, and the one cousin in this list that’s served cold rather than warm. Advocaat

Tom and Jerry

The American warm eggnog, and the one that most deserves reviving. A frothy egg batter spiked with dark rum and brandy, topped with hot milk and finished with grated nutmeg. It was enormously popular in nineteenth-century America and is now barely made. Tom and Jerry

Bombardino

The Italian alpine version: warm advocaat enriched with brandy under a cap of whipped cream. A ski-hut staple, and covered in the alpine drinks guide. Bombardino

Eierpunsch

The German market version, warm and custardy, poured alongside the glühwein at every Weihnachtsmarkt. See the German Christmas market guide.

Alcohol-Free Eggnog

Egg yolks, sugar, milk and double cream cooked gently into a thick vanilla-and-nutmeg custard, with no spirit at all. Worth making on its own terms rather than as a substitute. Alcohol-Free Eggnog

Making it properly

The single thing that separates a good homemade eggnog from a bad one is temperature control. Egg yolks begin to set well below boiling, so a custard base has to be cooked gently and stirred constantly, and pulled off the heat the moment it coats the back of a spoon.

Above roughly 70°C you are making scrambled eggs, and there is no recovering it. Our serving temperature guide covers the numbers, and the festive classics collection has the drinks this one gave rise to.