Festive pharmaceutical cocktail

With the festive season again upon us, readers may appreciate a recipe for an egg nog or egg flip, a drink that has long been associated with Christmas. Indeed, 24 December is National Egg Nog Day in the US.

Here is my egg flip recipe: rub together 15g of sugar and two egg yolks, then add 120ml each of brandy and cinnamon water and mix well.

You may be surprised to learn that this delicious tipple was for many years listed in the British Pharmacopoeia as Mistura Spiritus Vini Gallici, which translates as mixture of spirit of French wine, or brandy mixture.

The recipe set out above is my metric conversion of the formula in my copy of the 1868 BP, which specified 1/2 oz sugar, two egg yolks and 4 fl oz each of brandy and cinnamon water.

I first came across the mixture in the pre-metrication late 1960s during my preregistration year in a Boots branch. We began receiving regular prescriptions for 16 fl oz bottles of the mixture for a patient with terminal cancer. Since the local pharmaceutical wholesalers stocked neither eggs nor brandy, we had to dip into the petty cash fund to buy them.

For each bottle we had to double the BP quantities but, thanks to the sugar and egg yolk, this left us with slightly more than 16 fl oz, and so, in the interest of quality assurance, the dispensing assistant and I would nobly sample the remainder.

Repeat prescriptions arrived at increasingly frequent intervals until the day the patient died. We were sad for the patient and his family, but also somewhat despondent at losing the source of our small tipple.

There is evidence that precursors of the egg nog were used medicinally at least 1,000 years ago, although the easing of acute pain does not seem to have been a common indication.

According to a couple of mid-19th century manuals of materia medica, Mist Sp Vin Gall was used as a stimulant in depression and to sustain the circulation in various conditions.

It was also employed in low doses to assist digestion — which may explain its association with Christmas, when we tend to eat rich foods in excessive quantities. Cheers!