Eggnog Recipe from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese, ’88.
With backyard eggs, you can serve homemade eggnog at a holiday party with almost complete confidence that you won’t make anyone sick—from salmonella, anyway. Because drink enough homemade eggnog, and the race is on between heart failure and liver disease, unless a stroke fells you first. But life is short. Especially if you drink eggnog.
When we throw a Christmas party, which we do once every decade, I pull out my grandmother’s purple cut-glass punch bowl and fill it with this alcoholic eggnog. Then I open a square box of store-bought vanilla ice cream—trying to preserve the boxy shape—and drop it into the middle of the bowl of nog, where it both looks and functions like a giant ice cube. (Homemade ice cream is better, but it doesn’t come shaped like an ice cube.) The next morning, use the leftovers to make eggnog French toast.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: A production, but festive
Cost comparison: Tricky to price, but basically a draw. If you subtract liquor from the equation, homemade costs about $1.50 per quart—except a lot of that is air. If you try to squeeze the air out of the equation as well, homemade costs just over $3.00 per quart. Our local market last holiday season sold eggnog for $3.00 per quart. But it wasn’t nearly as good.
6 large eggs, separated
1 cup sugar
1 to 1 1/2 cups bourbon (start with the smaller quantity, taste, and see what you think)
1 to 1 1/2 cups rum (see bourbon)
2 cups whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
Lots of freshly grated nutmeg
A box of vanilla ice cream (optional)
1. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks until bright yellow. Add the sugar and beat until smooth. Stir in the bourbon, rum, and milk, scraping the sides of the bowl.
2. In another bowl, beat the cream until it forms soft peaks. Fold this into the eggnog.
3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold this into the eggnog.
4. Pour the eggnog into a punch bowl—it should be able to hold about 2 gallons. Sprinkle generously with nutmeg. If you want, float a brick of vanilla ice cream in the eggnog.
Makes about 1 1/2 gallons
EGGNOG FRENCH TOAST
To make eggnog French toast, pour leftover eggnog into a shallow pan and soak a few slices of bread for 5 minutes. Fry in hot butter until browned on both sides.
Excerpted from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Reese. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
