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Wassail to the Nog! The Old Timey Origins of Christmas Food Words
Welcome to Eat Your Words, a column where we get down to the muddy roots of the food words we know and love
Origin of the Wassail Bowl by James Godwin, 1865
Christmas is a time of good eating and good cheer, tinseled trees and arguments aboutwhat kinds of lights should go on those trees, but nestled in among the cookie platters and cooked geese are a lot of bizarre food words that we only really see this time of year. So for today’s Eat Your Words, we’re giving you a stocking stuffed with Christmas words that could use a bit of unwrapping.
Eggnog: Well, the first half is easy. It’s made with eggs! But the second half of the word, the innocent-looking little nog, is an etymological mystery as stubborn as the word is stubby. “Nog” on its own is the name of a strong, dark beer brewed in Norfolk, a county on the east coast of England. At this point, a somewhat lazy philologist would wipe the muck from his hands and declare the word fully dug up at the discovery of a boozy root, but why would a drink most commonly made with brandy, sherry (originally), or rum (in the American colonies) get its name from a beer?
Things start to heat up when we take a look at where the beery “nog” itself might come from. For words on the east coast of England, odds are the vikings (or peace-loving Danish settlers, whatever) are involved, and nog is no exception. The OED mentions that far-northern Scots refer to ale warmed with a hot poker as “nugg” or “nugged ale,” which in turn might come from the Danish “knag” (meaning “something pointy,” as in the hot poker). Here, it’s worth noting that cocktails made with eggs, spices, and alcohol were also known as “flips,” according Jerry Thomas’s seminal 1862 cocktail recipe book. And, interestingly, the first “flip,” in 1695, was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, heated with a hot poker to frothiness (which was called “flipping”). So in more staunchly English-speaking circles, you’ve got alcohol being “flipped” with a hot poker, and in slightly more Scandinavian sectors, the same alcohol is being “nugged.” As the flip evolved (and before eggs became a standard flip ingredient), those with eggs were called”egg-flips”–a term synonymous with “egg-nog” until American bar guides started considering nogs to be creamy and flips to be dairy-free.
So, to take it back a step, it’s likely that “nog” was once a regional term for “flip,” a drink made with hot-pokered beer. Over time, the Norfolk nog degraded into meaning their local beer, but the term had already hopped to the hot cocktail of beer, booze, and sugar. Then to the nog–alsoknown as a flip–eggs were added, and the enduring eggnog was born.
For the sake of thoroughness, I should add that another theory says that “eggnog” comes from the “noggin,” an old timey little mug used for serving alcoholic beverages, but there’s no more evidence for thatthan my flip/nog theory, and it’s much more boring.
Mulled wine: Once again, a Christmas-y tipple whose one half is a no-brainer (wine!) but whose other proves more elusive. I mean, “to mull” just means to heat and spice a drink, but where, exactly, that word comes from is a little murky. “Mull” has somehow picked up 17 different entries in the OED (11 for nouns, 6 for verbs), ranging in meaning from “a seaside promontory” to “the lips of an animal,” but at least in the verb category, the only meaning older than the alcoholic one is “to grind into a powder.”
This might lead one down a spicey path, assuming that the powdered cinnamon, allspice, or whatever you use in your favorite recipe led from “grinding into dust” to “adding said dust to wine and heating it.” But the earliest examples of “mulled wine” seem to emphasize the heat over the spice, so that might be a leap too far. This is one of the words that ultimately ends in a shrug, but an interesting possibility comes all the way from an Ancient Roman drink called “mulse.” It was a drink made of honey and either water or wine, which one 17th-century writer described as “boyled”–a bit of a shot in the dark, but it’s always nice to add a little history to your holiday drinking.
Wassail: Wassailing, in case you’re shaky on the definition, is a Christmastime tradition of basically walking around drunk and singing Christmas carols that, at some points in history, has included a trick-or-treat aspect of demanding “figgy pudding” and “good cheer.” And by “good cheer,” the wassailers don’t just mean some holiday wishes–they mean wassail itself, a hot mulled wine, cider, or beer punch that certainly adds a little oomph to all those Deck the Hallses and Hark the Heralds.
But even though “ale” is practically in the word, “wassail” actually comes from an Old English greeting that turned into a drinking salutation. “Wesath hale” was the Old English way to tell a group of people to “be well” (and hale means pretty much the same thing up to today), but it became codified into something like “cheers” in the 13th century as “waes hail.”
From there, it’s just a skip and a jump to wandering around drunk, wishing and demanding “good cheer” around the holidays. The big day for wassailing was traditionally the 12th Night of Christmas (January 6th), but some still insist on wassailing on “Old Twelvey Night” (January 17), which would have been the 12th Night before the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1752. And there’s even a wassail song, here sung by the U.S. Army Band:
But what’s a good cheers without a good reply? If you happen to run into any wassailers, the correct reply to “wassail!” isn’t “what’s that?” It’s the simple “Drinc hael!” to wish good drinking upon your well-wisher.