In the Vegas twilight of his career, Elvis Presley donned jumpsuits of silver lamé with electric-blue sashes, looking like an elephant in lingerie as he teetered across the stage, flinging damp hankies at his female admirers. Every bulge and bump on his sagging 250-pound physique was brazenly revealed. Who were his haberdashers? And is it still possible to prosecute them?
Now, decades down the road, fans still mourn him as a victim of drug abuse, a fallen American prince who popped uppers and downers until his 1977 collapse in a Graceland bathroom like a punctured blimp. But drugs weren’t Elvis’ only vice; what had he been pigging out on to make him so bloated? In observance of the 30th anniversary of his death, I decided to find out.
By now, everybody and their cousin knows that the King’s favorite tuck-in was a toasted peanut butter and banana sandwich. In fact, in a 2002 feature, CNN pointed an accusatory finger at the PB&B: “This gooey concoction, fatter than a herd of hogs, was what Elvis Presley reached for when his stomach yelped.” In the name of research, I found what seemed like an authentic recipe and executed it. To my surprise, it was delicious, with the salty peanut butter playing off the hyper-sweet banana. The viscous and sticky texture, too, was sublime (though I managed to splatter drops of molten peanut butter all over my jumpsuit).
It sure tasted of excess, but was it really that fattening? Using Random House’s Handy Diet & Nutrition Guide, and totaling up the sandwich’s component parts, I concluded that the legendary PB&B incorporates only 486 calories and 27.8 grams of fat, of which 10 grams are saturated. Compare that to a Big Mac with cheese — 740 calories, 43.7 fat grams with 17.7 grams saturated — and Elvis’ guilty pleasure doesn’t look so guilty after all. Perhaps he didn’t limit himself to only one?
The PB&B may have been invented by Elvis’ longtime cook and maid Pauline Nicholson, who called him Mr. P. and worked for him from 1964 till he died. Elvis was apparently very fond of her, calling her his “brown mama.” She was one of the last people to see him alive on Aug. 16, 1977, when he nipped off after playing an early-morning game of racquetball. But Pauline Nicholson was not the only one in the kitchen at Graceland: no, he employed people to make him sandwiches 24 hours a day. Mary Jenkins (who wrote “Elvis, Memories Beyond Graceland Gates”) was also African-American and also cooked for the King on a regular basis. She once famously said of him, “The only thing in life he got any enjoyment out of was eating.”
Jenkins is featured in “The Burger and the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley,” a 1996 docudrama made by the BBC and broadcast here on Cinemax. (And you thought the BBC was a classy outfit?) According to the film, Elvis bought a house for Mary Jenkins, who maintained that after his death, she could hear him rattling around in her bathroom every night. (Maybe he was rummaging in the medicine cabinet for some Tums.) But despite the movie’s penchant for ghost stories and polyester-clad impersonators, it does some decent spade work turning up Elvis’ early dining history. It reports, for example, that as a child in rural Mississippi, the King ate lots of critters including rabbits, squirrels and opossums. And even before he invented his signature pelvic thrust, Elvis was into organs, especially pig’s feet, ears and chitterlings. Later on, after his parents moved him at age 14 to Memphis, he ate lots of sloppy Joes at Humes High School, according to school authorities. Well, who didn’t?
Maybe Elvis did try to reform his nutritional habits near the end of his life, because his personal physician, George (“Dr. Nick”) Nichopoulos, claims that Presley went on a cleansing diet of papaya juice in the months before his death. That might have been what killed him. Then again, Dr. Nick is hardly an arbiter of healthfulness: He was the one who prescribed all those uppers and downers.
As an adult, according to various sources, Elvis loved meatloaf, and would eat it for days on end. Living where he did, it would have taken all the willpower in the world to refrain from gorging on Memphis’ wonderful barbecue. One of his known haunts was Interstate, known more formally as Jim Neely’s Interstate Bar-B-Que. Located just south of downtown Memphis on South 3rd Street, near a corner that’s mainly gas stations and convenience stores, it remains a favorite of security guards, truckers and other working-class types. Signed photos of bluesmen and rockers smother the walls. Interstate is from the “wet” school of Memphis barbecue, meaning that most of the meats come extravagantly slathered with sticky sweet barbecue sauce. Those meats include beef and pork ribs, chopped beef, chopped pork, pork sausage, and something called barbecued spaghetti — pasta mixed with barbecue sauce and tidbits of smoked pork. (Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!) There is some evidence that Elvis preferred Interstate’s chopped pork sandwich with barbecue sauce, with the cole slaw put right in the sandwich — a concoction every bit as gloppy as the PB&B.
Another Memphis hang that the King frequented early in his career was Arcade, a Greek diner with pink booths, founded in 1919 on South Main Street. The joint serves mainly pizzas and sandwiches, and Elvis usually sat by himself in a dark corner booth, head down, not wanting to be recognized by other diners. Reportedly, his favorite order was cheeseburgers — well done, please. According to Elvis historian Paul Denton, “In his 20s, Elvis told Country Song Roundup magazine he could polish off eight deluxe cheeseburgers, two bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches and three milkshakes in a single sitting.” Not bad for a skinny dude! He also gorged on cheeseburgers at a restaurant called the Gridiron, on U.S. Highway 51.
Among the other foods that Elvis craved — based on Web accounts that should be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe a gram of cholesterol — were six-egg omelets, banana pudding, cornbread dipped in buttermilk, vegetable soup, macaroni salad, weenie and sauerkraut sandwiches, grits with milk gravy, baked ham, mashed potatoes, pizzas with barbecue sauce, and burned bacon, a pound at a time. He wouldn’t have liked another Memphis specialty, fried Mississippi catfish, since he hated the smell of fish. Quoth Mary Jenkins in “Elvis, Memories Beyond Graceland Gates”: “Elvis didn’t like seafood at all. He wouldn’t let us cook it whenever he was in the house. And he didn’t care for food with bones in it either, like fried chicken. He liked it boneless.” Also according to Jenkins, Elvis’ favorite dinner at home was roast beef, duck stuffed with dressing, string beans, creamed potatoes, mixed vegetables and biscuits. He also apparently asked her to cut his meat into bite-size pieces before she served it.
But why just read about what Elvis ate when you can make it yourself? A cottage cookbook industry has sprung up to offer recipes for Elvis’ favorite foods. Some are co-authored by people who knew him, but many, like “The Presley Family and Friends Cookbook” by Edie Hand, Darcy Bonfils, Ken Beck, Jim Clark and Donna Presley Early (Elvis’ cousin), are larded with jokey recipes based on titles of his songs or movies, such as Blue Suede Shoes Cream of Broccoli Soup, King Creole Lobster Bisque, Too Much Monkey Business Banana Bread, and Hound Dog Homemade Hush Puppies. Of course, no good book can exist without a sequel, so the same authors also barfed out “Are You Still Hungry Tonight?” (not to be confused with another cookbook of almost the same name) and “All Cooked Up.”
Other Elvis-inspired recipe collections include “The Presley Family Cookbook” by Vester Presley and Nancy Rooks; “Are You Hungry Tonight?” by Brenda Butler; “Graceland’s Table: Recipes and Meal Memories Fit for the King of Rock and Roll” by Ellen Rolfes; “Fit for a King” by Elizabeth McKeon, Ralph Gevirtz and Julie Bandy, which purports to include recipes from Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding reception and the Beatles’ visit to Graceland. And we can’t forget “The I Love Elvis Cookbook” by Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen, which hedges its bets by proclaiming, “Most of the recipes are pretty sinful. Lots of cream, butter and bacon. Oh, yes Elvis loved bacon on just about everything, including his famous Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich. But if that combo sounds a little suspicious, there are dozens of traditional Southern standards sure to pacify the most kingly appetite.”
Even road food’s royal couple, Jane and Michael Stern, jump into the act with “Elvis World.” Though it isn’t a cookbook, this scholarly and lavishly illustrated coffee table volume collects many Elvis-related food facts, including his favorite restaurants and an actual shopping list from Graceland, which includes, predictably enough, Pepsi, ground beef, canned sauerkraut, bacon, peanut butter, boxed banana pudding, and canned frozen biscuits. Finally, squarely in the meta-cookbook genre is David Adler’s “The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley,” which takes what might be a historio-existential view of Presley’s caloric intake. “Food, his first love, was the love that destroyed him,” declares Adler, while offering a slew of recipes, including one for Elvis’ wedding cake, and another for “shit on a shingle,” the chipped beef on toast Elvis ate while in the Army. And demonstrating, at least, that it wasn’t always good to be the King.
Consider the oyster. Found all over the world, the common bivalve isn’t pretty: The gray mottled shell is pock-marked and plain, its uneven halves don’t quite fit together. Yet as an inducement to love, its reputation is unequaled. The Roman satirist Juvenal heartily endorsed it, and the 18th century courtesan Marquis de Pompadour deployed it — along with chocolate and celery — in her seductive arsenal. (Another of her contributions to sex appeal: Elvis’ hairdo.) Casanova sucked down 50 raw oysters each morning while lolling in his bath, gazing at the next gal in line. Even today, young and old men in New York’s Little Italy stand at neighborhood oyster bars downing a half-dozen as an inspiration for the evening’s activities. It’s about the only aphrodisiac everyone can agree on. After all, Aphrodite was spawned from an oyster shell.
But why oysters? Perhaps it’s because, when the shell opens, they bear a blush-inducing resemblance to the female anatomy. There’s certainly a curious thrill to teasing a raw oyster out of its shell using only your tongue and teeth, and lapping the juices. In addition, the texture of these slippery creatures resembles the amorous excretions of both sexes. As a friend observed after consuming his first raw oyster, “It’s like the King of England coming in your mouth.”
In a taxonomy of reputed aphrodisiacs, the oyster establishes an important principle. Specifically, the notion that an aphrodisiac is effective to the extent that it resembles a sex organ is called “mimesis.” Only a handful of aphrodisiacs are vaginal — most notably the fig, the peach (Remember “Eat a Peach” by the Allman Brothers?), and epithelial orchids, which were made into a slew of potions in France and India during the Middle Ages. When it comes to getting it on, more aphrodisiacs claim to aid in getting it up — and so are modeled on the penis. Raw leeks, carrots and celery are common mimetics that are prized in many cultures. More ambitiously amorous chefs might try the Kama Sutra’s recipe, which suggests boiling asparagus in a combination of cow’s milk and ghee, flavoring it with lots of anise. That’s anise, not anus.
The Arabs swallowed live skinks — slippery, long-tailed lizards — as an inducement to manly feats. Snake blood is another popular aphrodisiac, based on the facile resemblance of penis to snake; some parlors in Malaysia still offer the reptiles perforated near the tail for easy drinking. The Turks preferred satyrion root (the name says it all), a substance so powerful it prompted 17th-century scientist Athanasius Kircher to exclaim, “Odd, they’ll make one old fellow of sixty-five cut a caper like a dancing master.” Ginseng serves the same purpose today, although the root is thought to resemble the whole man rather than just the dangling participle.
The horn as a symbol of the erect male member may be too obvious to mention, responsible as it is for that enduring expression of ardor, “I’m so horny.” But less benignly, the murder of African and Indian rhinos for their horns, used in powdered form in traditional Asian potency medicines, has endangered both species, and the recent uptick in the Chinese economy has apparently intensified the problem. In a pinch, it seems any variety will do, since the bony protuberances of water buffalo and saiga antelope are now in demand.
Aphrodisiac enthusiasts are anything but subtle: Tiger penis or, indeed, the member of any animal thought to display manly characteristics (even the dog — larger canines preferred), is always en vogue. Intrepid Australian traveler Paul Bakker recounts his experience eating at a unique North Korean restaurant. Ushered late one evening by his state-appointed guides into a low concrete building, with a disco ball, that was part restaurant, part karaoke bar, Bakker discovered that the table d’hôte was pooch. The specialty, considered a form of health food throughout Korea (though I’ve also eaten dog in Queens, N.Y.!), was served in a series of courses beginning with the backbone, then proceeding through barbecued ribs and on to a series of stews. When Bakker’s translator announced that the most important part of the meal was about to arrive, he referred to it as the middle leg. Observed the author, “The shape was unmistakable. As if on cue, a drunken Korean jumped up from the next table and started belting out a patriotic folk song.” Bakker doesn’t report what it tasted like, or what he was inspired to do after the meal.
Of course, you don’t have to go to all the way to Korea to enjoy the revivifying effects of animal penis. Even in the U.S., most Jamaican eateries serve up cow cod soup on the weekends, a thick pottage of the bovine member cut up into little gelatinous pieces and mixed with roots and herbs selected for their similar therapeutic effects. This soup is used more for prophylaxis than for remedial purposes, and, come Saturday night, no Jamaican man feels embarrassed about fortifying himself with a serving in full view of the other diners. When you give it a try, wash it down with one of the roots tonics that are available in the same restaurants, and which sport unmistakable names like Front End Lifter, Tan-Pon-It Long or Agony Drink.
When it comes to sexual comestibles, though dick is desirable, balls will do, too. Rocky mountain oysters, a popular euphemism for bull testicles in the Western United States, cleverly uses one aphrodisiac to refer to another. Next time you’re in a Middle Eastern restaurant, scan the menu for “lamb fries,” the evasive moniker for charcoal-grilled testicles. I once led a pair of families, children in tow, to a Lebanese restaurant in Astoria, Queens. Along with a dozen or so familiar dishes, we ordered a plate of lamb fries, not quite sure what to expect. When they arrived, the tender meat was instantly recognizable by its almond shape. Imagine our surprise when the young children in our party, who had eschewed most of the food placed before them, fell on the testicles like ravenous dogs. Gradually turning red, the parents watched in silence. They made a pact never to reveal the nature of the meat to the kids, fearing years later they’d be accused in court, kids shouting from the witness stand: “They forced us to eat animal testicles!”
Of course, demanding that aphrodisiacs resemble sex organs is a rather simple-minded approach, and there are still many prescriptions that depart from the formula. As an invitation to erotic adventures, almost any well-prepared meal can be effective (especially if it’s served with a few bottles of limb-loosening wine). According to the Marquis de Sade in “Juliette”: “le bon dîner peut causer une volupté physique” (“a good dinner generates a physical voluptuousness”). Spicy food is especially stimulating, and anise, cinnamon, saffron, garlic, black pepper, white pepper and chili peppers are all thought to have aphrodisiacal properties — the last three perhaps because they generate a hot sweat, just like sex, and a glow that lingers in the digestive tract.
When introduced into Europe from South America in the 16th century, the tomato earned the name “love apple,” and even today, foods that are both tomatoey and heavily spiced are often referred to as “lusty.” All red-sauced Italian fare fits this category, especially puttanesca, in which several erotically efficacious ingredients come into play at once. This “harlot’s sauce” associated with Naples and Calabria contains tomatoes, red peppers, garlic, onions, anchovies and capers. Eat some poured over, say, penne cooked al dente, and see if it doesn’t make you feel like loosening your belt.
Other amorous edibles run contrary to logic. In Elizabethan England, prunes were provided free of charge in brothels. It sounds absurd, but then who knows what they were doing in there? Other favorites of the time included dates, quinces and potatoes — just arrived from the New World and thought to have magical properties. Brillat-Savarin, waxing overly poetic, asserted that truffles induce “erotic and gastronomic ideas both in the sex wearing petticoats and in the bearded portion of humanity.” And Eugene Duren, in his 1901 commentary on Sade, reports that “In some parts of Germany men eat flatulent foods like beans, peas, lentils, and radishes in order that they may attain powerful erections by way of the accumulated gas.” Don’t try this at home!
Chocolate has always been a popular choice among lovers, although opinions vary as to its efficacy. One anonymous 19th-century pornographer called it “fit for serving maids … an incentive working not upon the body but upon the mind. It generates a complacent and yielding disposition.” Another warns against it, at least for men: “in liquid form it is hot cocoa … filling your guts with slimy warmth which drives away all thoughts of gallantry.” These days, conventional wisdom dictates that chocolates are most effective when delivered to your sweetie in an oversize heart-shaped box.
But maybe you want to give just plain hearts? Swallows’ hearts were among the list of popular medieval aphrodisiacs, as were, by the same reasoning, any pair of lovebirds, like turtle doves baked in a pie. Other unexpected aphrodisiacs of the ages included menstrual blood, fat from a camel’s hump, the wings of bees, the powdered tooth of a corpse, male or female hedgehog genitals, bat blood mixed with asses’ milk, and salted crocodile. The application can be even more absurd than the ingredient, whether intended to stimulate a flagging manhood, or induce a greater receptivity in the love object, or both. Mathiolis, a medieval German pharmacist who gave his name to several plant species, even recommended refining the camphorlike crystals from the flesh of a civet cat and rubbing them on the penis; a salve of fresh ginger serves the same purpose.
But now that I think of it, rubbing anything on the penis would probably work.
What the hell is a nog anyway? Among the festive beverages of Christmas — including the wassail bowl of warm ale bobbing with apples; the mixture of Scotch and ginger wine known as whisky mac; and the traditional Yuletide punch of rum, brandy, lemons and oranges — eggnog reigns supreme. So far-reaching is its popularity that, come Thanksgiving, red-and-green cartons of it line the dairy cases of nearly every supermarket across the U.S.
The origins of the word “nog” are shrouded in mystery. It might be a wooden block embedded in a brick wall, into which nails are driven for mounting things. Or it could be a dark foamy ale that’s been brewed in Norfolk, England, since the 1600s. But nowadays a nog rarely stands on its own, occurring mainly in compound form as eggnog. Even Webster’s definition, with its elastic recipe — “An often alcoholic drink containing beaten egg, milk, or both” — asks more questions than it answers. And what about “noggin”? It’s a waggish term for one’s cranium, of course, but the dictionary lists two further meanings: 1) a small quantity of drink, or 2) a small carved mug — which led one commentator to suggest with apparent seriousness that eggnog actually represents a shortening of the bar-side request, “Egg and grog in a noggin, please.” Say it real fast when tipsy, and it turns into “eggnog,” I guess.
Some accounts claim that Capt. John Smith knocked back bumpers of eggnog in Jamestown, Va., as early as 1607, and that this “nog” is really just a corruption of the word “grog.” In line with 17th century English recipes, Smith’s eggnog would have been a simple concoction of ale mixed with eggs, which sounds vile. But, hey, isn’t that just like having a hangover remedy mixed in with the substance that produced the hangover in the first place? What is certain as far as eggnog and Virginia are concerned is that George and Martha Washington indulged in it during their 1769 Christmas festivities at Millbank — his sister Betty Lewis’ stately home near Williamsburg — as part of an oddly modern-sounding dinner featuring ham made from hogs fed on mash from George’s Mount Vernon distillery, oysters from the nearby Rappahannock River, fresh corn from the surrounding fields baked into a souffli, cucumber pickles and pumpkin chips — whatever those were. Washington must have been a big fan of eggnog, because he had his own special recipe that, in addition to eggs, milk and cream, was spiked with brandy, whisky, rum and sherry. Clean out the liquor cabinet, why don’t you, George?
It’s tempting to assume eggnog is British, partly on the basis of the Anglo-Saxon derivation of the name, and partly because of English punches it resembles. But what if eggnog is really an American invention? That would explain why, unlike the English prototypes, no modern American version features ale or beer. Also, the presence of rum in our most common recipes is a reminder that rum — a byproduct of the trade in sugar cane and slaves in the New World — was the most abundant alcohol in the Colonies. Finally, an additional piece of evidence for an American origin involves Alexis Soyer, the French expatriate chef and enterprising humanitarian who invented the soup kitchen to address the Irish famine and the camp stove to cook for wounded Crimean War soldiers. It seems one of Soyer’s more harebrained schemes, described by Sarah Freeman in her book “Mutton & Oysters,” was to open an American-style bar in London serving American cocktails. One of the cocktails prominently mentioned? Eggnog, of course.
Still other theorists opine that eggnog didn’t originate with the Brits, but was an American adaptation of a French recipe dating from a time in the 18th century when American colonists were tight with the French (and I mean that in more ways than one). The French recipe is known as “lait de poule,” which translates, repulsively, as “chicken milk.” In modern Quebec, the drink goes by the name lait de poule to this day, though the rest of Anglophone Canada calls it an “eggflip,” which suggests to me not an Xmas beverage laced with rum, but one dosed with LSD. While modern Québécois quaffers associate lait de poule with an American-style Christmas, the drink got a nod 150 years ago in Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” in which the character Justin asks for one to fortify himself, presumably for sexual purposes. (Oh yeah, Emma was hot!) The aggressively luxurious egg, cream and milk composition of eggnog also suggests a French origin. In Normandy and Brittany — provinces that produced the greatest migration to Maritime Canada — such a relentless use of rich dairy products is the epitome of good cooking.
Of course, one more permutation of eggnog needs to be addressed. How did the hot version come to be called a “Tom and Jerry”? When I was a kid in Minnesota, the eggnog my brothers and I furtively gulped right from the carton contained plenty of rum flavoring, but no actual alcohol. We couldn’t help noticing our parents sipped a warmed and considerably more alcoholic version, called Tom and Jerry, out of pressed-glass punch bowls at their Christmas parties. Naturally, we thought the name was a tribute to the animated cat and mouse who chased each other across our black-and-white TV — and it seemed a fitting one for a drink that made adults act as silly as cartoon characters.
In fact, the notion of spiking warmed eggnog dates at least to the mid-19th century. The cocktail itself was a turn of the 19th century American invention, whose greatest proponent and popularizer was professor Jerry Thomas, a bartender at New York’s Metropolitan Hotel in the years before the Civil War. Thomas (who also invented the martini, which he called the martinez) penned the world’s first mixed-drink formulary, “The Bar-Tender’s Guide, or How to Mix Drinks.” Prominent among his recipes was one for eggnog, and theorists believe a heated version of the recipe, which became popular around that time, was dubbed Tom and Jerry in tribute to the “Professor.” Others say Thomas actually invented the drink himself, though that prompts the question: Wouldn’t he have called it Jerry and Tom, in observance of the proper sequence of his own name? Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source, claims the hot nog was named after two characters in Pierce Egan’s monthly newspaper journal (an early forerunner of the blog) titled “Life in London,” and subtitled “The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom.” That literary masterpiece engendered a famous 19th century expression: Whether used as a noun or verb, “Tom and Jerry” meant a violent altercation between drinkers.
Fond memories of my childhood tipples spurred a recent trip to my supermarket for a batch of the locally made stuff. As I’d remembered it, the handsome quart container was green and white, limned with poinsettias and galloping reindeer. But were those small white orbs sprinkled around the carton Christmas ornaments or alcoholic bubbles? The ingredient list at the bottom of the carton told a mournful tale:
“Grade A milk & cream, sugar, Grade A milk powder, spray dried egg yolks, Grade A whey powder (a milk derivative), natural and artificial flavoring (maltodextrin, natural and artificial flavors, modified food starch), stabilizer (guar gum, carrageenan), sugar, corn starch, salt, nutmeg, annatto-turmeric (color).”
Hmm. It sounded more salutary than, say, a bag of Doritos, but there was still a sort of useless complexity about it, considering eggnog is actually a milk product with an expiration date. (I shuddered to imagine the ingredients in the canned variety, which keeps almost forever.) The nutritional value panel was nearly as alarming. But wait, hope: Far from being the cardiac arrest in a can I’d feared, eggnog’s caloric content — 180 calories, with 80 attributed to fat, 24 percent of it saturated — came as a pleasant surprise, especially since drinking the stuff is usually a once-a-year occurrence. But my cheer was short-lived: I noticed the figures were calculated based on a 4-ounce serving size. Nobody has ever, ever, ever consumed only 4 ounces of eggnog — and that’s before adding alcohol. Figure another 73 calories for an ounce of rum — or, what the hell, 146 calories for a couple of shots — and you could easily drink half your daily allowance of calories in one eggnog binge.
But developing a Santa-like physique is not the only risk associated with eggnog. During the salmonella egg scare several years ago, warnings were broadcast about the use of raw eggs in homemade eggnog, a danger I instantly assumed was overblown. (The real salmonella scare is with cross-contaminated chicken, improperly butchered raw beef, and — I’m so glad to add to the list — organic spinach from California.) My mom sometimes made eggnog by throwing a couple of raw eggs with some whole milk, sugar and nutmeg in the blender. It never made my brothers and me sick, but we secretly preferred the engineered zing of the store-bought stuff. For us kids, the appeal of eggnog was always its heady, artificially flavored richness and texture that verged on the extraterrestrial. Even then, I’m sure it contained a poisonous cocktail of flavorings and additives, and had a haunting bouquet redolent of rum and nutmeg, a texture like a sex lubricant, and a color like the first appearance of jaundice on a junkie’s pink cheek. But come Christmas, we craved it more than fruitcakes, candy canes or chocolate Santa Clauses. There was just something wholesome about it. If it contained milk and eggs, our unformed brains reasoned, how could it be naughty? Those were such innocent times.
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If this article hasn’t made you swear off eggnog permanently, here are a few recipes to try this season.
James Beard, in “Fireside Cookbook” (1949), gives a bartender’s formula for an individual serving of eggnog, something like the recipe my own mother used:
1 fresh egg
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
2 ounces brandy, port, rum, sherry, bourbon or rye
8 ounces rich milk
Nutmeg
Shake ingredients together and strain into tall glass. Garnish with a sprinkle of nutmeg on top.
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For a much richer, punch-bowl-size batch, this recipe can be made days ahead and left to chill in the refrigerator until party time.
12 large eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
5 cloves
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 quart half-and-half
1 quart rum or cognac
1 quart whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, to taste
Separate the egg yolks from whites. In a big bowl, mix yolks with sugar until pale and slightly thickened. Add milk, liquor, cinnamon, cloves, vanilla and nutmeg and combine well. Chill for five hours or overnight.
In a separate bowl, whip cream until soft peaks form. Set aside. Using another clean bowl and beater, whip the egg whites until they forms soft peaks. Then, add whipped cream and egg whites to chilled egg mixture and fold in until incorporated. Sprinkle each serving with additional nutmeg. Makes 30 servings.
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Finally, for the salmonella-fearful, here’s a recipe that utilizes cooked eggs rather than raw ones. But I don’t really recommend it, since taking chances with your health and financial well-being is half the fun of Christmas!
There’s been an avalanche of cookbooks published over the last decade on increasingly obscure and constricted topics — I recently received one devoted entirely to chocolate cookies. Riding the coattails of this trend has been a handful of non-cookbooks devoted to individual foods, often with a few recipes thrown in to enhance their appeal among cookbook consumers. Two prototypes were “Sweetness and Power,” an exhaustive neo-Marxist study of the history and economics of sugar by Sidney Mintz, and “Corn,” Betty Fussel’s lengthy and abundantly illustrated exploration of the romance of maize. These treatments remained at least partly academic, but subsequent contributions have been more slender and written in a more popular vein — you can read them lying down while a dog licks your feet without loss of comprehension.
Wall Street Journal reporter Amal Naj’s “Peppers,” one of the best books ever written about food, proved that the Portuguese were responsible for nearly every modern food trend; and lately we’ve feasted on Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod,” a brief historical and environmental epic by a one-time cod fisherman. Now along comes Frank Browning’s “Apples.” Like Kurlansky, he’s practiced what he preaches, coming from a long line of Kentucky orchardists. In the opening pages he presents himself as something of a backwoods hillbilly, until you learn that his father liked to spout Latin and that he himself has written several books and served as a National Public Radio commentator and has lived in New York, San Francisco and Paris. How he did this while keeping the family farm from sinking is never fully explained.
Browning has produced an interesting and readable book on apples, which he rhapsodically calls “the hardiest, most resilient and most diverse fruit on the earth.” Like all of the single-topic food books, “Apples” works best when there’s a mystery to be solved, in this case the origin of the first apple, the search for which takes the author to the Central Asian republic of Kazhakstan. There he meets Aimak Djangaliev, an octogenarian pomologist who, almost predictably, spent the first part of his career hiding from Stalin’s secret police. It turns out that the ancient apple forests of the Tian Shan mountains possess genetic traits that have much to offer the modern apple breeder, even though the gnarled and uncultivated trees often produce apples Browning calls “spitters” — one bite and you have to spit them out.
Djangaliev is only one in a cast of fascinating characters who bring the book to life. There’s also Tom Burford, the specialist charged with repopulating Monticello’s apple orchards, who searches for the tantalizing Taliaferro, a long-lost cider apple said to be Jefferson’s favorite, and Akio Tanii, a Japanese agricultural researcher who was hectored into committing suicide after inadvertently revealing to Western scientists the presence of fire blight in Japanese fruit. Browning handles scientific topics like fire blight with ease, drawing parallels with human diseases. Indeed, the sections of the book that deal with apple genetics are miraculous in their clarity and readability. Less interesting is the apple mythology, wherein the author retells familiar stories from Greek, Roman and Scandinavian sources as if running a foot race while the publisher shoots at him from behind.
As is the habit with this sort of book, the back matter contains recipes, here presented in a narrative form that may frustrate less-accomplished cooks. Much better is the appendix that devotes a paragraph apiece to the 20 apples most prized by the author. I’m taking this with me on my next visit to the farmer’s market.
