Eggnog to Tom and Jerry

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, this litle factoid on a brand extension of eggnog called "Tom and Jerry". Over to Robert Sietsema, who writes the weekly column "Counter Culture" for The Village Voice and is the author of "The Food Lover's Guide to the Best Ethnic Eating in New York City."

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 dog and cat 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.