Craig Claiborne’s Eggnog from 1959

Three Kinds of Foam

It’s eggnog season through New Year’s Eve. Any home version is very different from the one poured out of a carton, and Craig Claiborne’s is the extreme. In essence, it’s three kinds of foam combined and eaten with a spoon. It’s dessert. People like it when I make it, although very few come back for a second cup. I’ve been making for 20 years, ever since I found it in the first New York Times Cookbook from 1961. The recipe is an artifact of a now-faraway time and place — New York aside, Claiborne was born in 1920 in Sunflower, Mississippi. He presented a prototype in the daily Times in 1957: “Kentucky Eggnog” came, with credit, from David Embury’s book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, which has five eggnogs and is still a cocktail point of reference. Claiborne published his enduring revision on December 29, 1959, calling it “a family recipe for a Southern eggnog.” He reduced Embury’s two quarts of liquor to two cups, the sugar from four and a half cups to one, milk became just an option, and, in an innovation, he whipped the cream.

I don’t make the eggnog every year. The memory or maybe the sense of richness is enough to last two or three years, even though I’ve pulled back further. I add a mere half-cup of dark rum and reduce the cream from three pints to two. Claiborne chilled his yolk mixture for several hours and the finished eggnog for another hour, but I made a small batch of the eggnog by last-minute request on Christmas Eve with no chilling at all and hardly noticed the difference.

The full twelve-egg recipe serves around three dozen. Even a two-egg version, such as I made the other night, serves six. I whisk everything by hand, but an electric beater or mixer makes sense. For serving, instead of punch cups with teaspoons, espresso cups and spoons are excellent. The eggnog is best on the day it’s made; it gradually separates into foam floating on liquid. For a completely different approach, see aged eggnog. The odds are probably on your side, but there’s a potential risk to consuming raw eggs: caveat bibitor.

12 large eggs, separated

200 gr (1 cup) sugar

125 ml (½ cup) dark rum or bourbon

1 teaspoon cream of tartar, if you use a noncopper bowl

a nutmeg, for grating

1 liter (1 quart) heavy cream

Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until the sugar partly dissolves and the color turns pale — whisk, wait a few minutes, whisk, wait a few minutes, whisk again to form a foam.

If you have a large unlined copper bowl, rub it with vinegar and salt, rinse and dry it with a clean towel, and beat the egg whites in it until they just form stiff peaks. With a noncopper bowl, add the cream of tartar to the whites and beat them. Fold the whites into the yolk mixture, and add a grating of nutmeg (a Microplane is the perfect tool).

Whisk the cream to soft peaks and fold that into the egg foam. Optionally, pour the eggnog into a punch bowl. Grate a little nutmeg on top of the eggnog and ladle it into cups, each with a spoon. Serves around 3 dozen people.