Fight with knives

Eggnog for One: How to Impress Your Date

All right, kids. I don’t normally dispense romantic advice on this here blog because I like to keep the house secrets as house secrets, but it’s the holidays and I’m feeling generous. One of the benefits of having worked at a cocktail bar for a year and a half is that I can always make conversation at a house party, and then I can get you drunk on something slightly more delicious than a bourbon ginger. I’m by no means a picky, trained bartender, but I was working at one of Food and Wine’s top 50 bars in America (proud!) so I know some stuff.

Anyway. At this time of year, for whatever reason, people think eggnog is a super great idea. Currently I am dating one of those who are partial to drinking whole, raw eggs at the holidays (no, he’s not Rocky or Gaston, but you’re close). I can’t stand eggnog, or any cocktail that contains a large portion of cream, especially when it is combined with eggs, but I have a large amount of cocktail knowledge, and among that is how to make eggnog for one, so I figured I’d do something nice for my man friend and impress him with some eggnog for one.

Here is how you impress your date:

• Put two ice cubes in a cocktail shaker. You need a cocktail shaker for this drink.
• Take one egg. Preferably a farm egg, but both the farms my co-op gets eggs from had issues with salmonella and chicken rights this year, so I barely even give a shit about where I get my eggs from anymore. Salmonella’s on the shell anyway, so crack it into the shaker all one-handedlike (you should learn how to do this; haven’t you seen Sabrina?), toss the shell and wash your hands. If you want to eat eggs, ever, you’re taking chances anyway. Your life is full of taking chances, and eggnog is all of those chances in one glass.
• Add some heavy cream. No half and half. No milk. Heavy whipping cream. Add like 2/3 of a shot of it. There’s already a whole egg in there, so not too much.
• Add a shot of a sweet brown booze. Rum, brandy, and bourbon all work perfectly well; rye, gin, or vodka are all terrible ideas for eggnog. You can put in more than a shot, too.
• Put in a healthy dash of vanilla extract. That’s like 35% alcohol, so it’s pretty much your bitters.
• Add some sugar, preferably brown. If it’s a new potential lover you’re trying to impress, you’ll have pre-made a simple syrup, but once you’ve been dating for a while, you can just throw some sugar in there. Not too much; just enough.
• Add more healthy dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg.
• Shake it up! Shake it up until the metal of the cocktail shaker gets so cold you can barely hold it. Shake it hard, so that your date sees that you are STRONG and good at MOVING.
• Strain it into a nice cocktail glass and top it with a dash of cinnamon.

Your date will be drinking that raw egg and cream boozefest in no time. Then, make yourself a hot toddy and the two of you can snuggle and watch Elf, cocktails in hand, knowing that you didn’t waste a ton of time making one of those giant batches of eggnog that are on recipe websites. If a real bartender (like my former boss) sees this, he will probably cry “BLASPHEMY!”, but your date will not know the difference.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Sunday Night Screed #2: Cosmopolitans

Surfing the Internet looking for something to read on a Sunday night? Here, let me occupy ten minutes of your time.

As some of you may know, I work at a cocktail bar and I’ve been reading about the art of drinking with much more regularity. Articles like this one make me laugh knowingly— it is so true, friends, even though the word “invented” is used wayyy too much re: cocktails—and I annoy my friends with my tippling snobbery and unnecessary lecturing. Recently I’ve read most of Imbibe! and, via a long-ago recommendation from Maura, I’ve been reading And a Bottle of Rum, which is all about rum and American history and is pretty wonderful.

But when gentlemen start talking about drinking, along with how awful prohibition was, there’s only a sentence or two about how temperance was closely linked with suffrage, even though there are extended descriptions of Ernest Hemingway’s distended liver.  Cultural histories of drinking are almost exclusively about men, with women like the hardass Carry Nation or super annoying flappers arriving to ruin Gatsby’s good time. The few books that examine women and alcohol, prohibition, or temperance are relegated to the academic shelf.

Even in our enlightened age where women are allowed into all the bars, drinking is a problem for women, while men can drunkenly roar by relatively unnoticed. Esquire publishes drink recipes but Cosmopolitan does not.* If we go by what is published, women can’t consume a cocktail without someone or other raising an eyebrow.

Read More