Yankee Desserts in Ireland: Egg Nog

Oh lord, this one is the one that stops Irish people dead in their tracks.

I don’t know what goes through their head when they hear about it – images of Rocky swallowing raw eggs in Rocky I? It’s no wonder, when the title describes both eggs and some mysterious thing called a “nog” that doesn’t seem to be a verb that describes cooking of the egg – after all, they’ve seen yankees quaffing this stuff in movies and on television and everyone knows a cooked egg cannot be drank – the uninitiated would get horrible images of raw egg coursing down their throats.

Yuck.

Well, as anyone stateside reading this knows, egg nog is a lovely milkshake-like alcoholic drink that leads to terrible drunken mistakes at office Christmas parties across America. Personally, I take my egg nog very seriously. I try to use good bourbon (the only good bourbon in my opionion is Maker’s Mark, that’s the one with the red melted wax all over it). Secondly, I use fresh, free range, organic eggs and good Irish sugar, milk and cream. I also tend only to add spices as a topping, creating an extremely aromatic nog with spices that the drinker can swirl into her drink as he or she goes along.

I love seeing the surprise and delight on Irish faces when I make egg nog every Christmas. I also love to see them declare they can’t taste the alcohol in it when they ask for their fifth cup.

Hee hee.