Tom & Jerry (serves 6)

Serve in a

How to make:

1. Select and pre-heat a Toddy glass.
2. Prepare garnish of grated nutmeg.
3. Pre-warm six 20cl (6.75oz) toddy glasses or Tom & Jerry mugs with hot water.
4. Using a whisk, BEAT the yolks in a mixing bowl "until they are thin as water." Add sugar, Jamaican rum, spices and STIR thoroughly with whisk.
5. In a separate bowl, use a whisk to BEAT the egg whites "to a stiff froth.".
6. Use a tablespoon to FOLD the frothy egg whites into the spiced and beaten yolk mixture. This produces the gloopy base mixture known as 'Tom & Jerry batter'.
7. To make individual drinks, to each of the warmed glasses or mugs, POUR cognac and rum, and add two table spoons of Tom & Jerry batter. STIR each glass/mug thoroughly with a barspoon while topping with boiling water.
8. Each should end up with frothy head ready to receive the garnish of grated nutmeg.

Allergens:

Recipe contains the following allergens:

• Egg white – Eggs
• Egg yolk – Eggs

Review:

A warming and filling winter's meal in itself. This recipe will fill six small toddy glasses or Tom & Jerry mugs (each 20cl capacity to brim), and given the faff involved you might as well double or treble the recipe and make for a crowd, or enjoy several each.

Once a wintertime staple served in taverns and saloons across America, the Tom & Jerry cocktail/punch was relegated to obscurity until recent years when cocktail resurgence and the drink's connections to Jerry Thomas assured its resurrection - particularly as a drink served over the Christmas period.

One of the reasons for its decline could be the perceived faff involved in its production - especially the 'Tom & Jerry batter' base. However, it's easy to make and uses common household ingredients.

History:

Due to his own claims of being this drink's inventor, the Tom & Jerry was for many years credited to Jerry Thomas at the Planter's House Hotel in St Louis. However, the origins of the Tom & Jerry cocktail predate the flamboyant 'Professor'.

Although there are earlier written references, the cocktail appeared in Jerry Thomas' first 1862 edition of How To Mix Drinks.

Tom and Jerry.
(Use punch-bowl for the mixture.)
5 lbs. sugar.
12 eggs.
½ small glass of Jamaican rum.
1½ teaspoonful of ground cinnamon.
½ teaspoon of ground cloves.
½ teaspoon of ground allspice.
Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and the yolks until they are thin as water, then mix together and add the spice and rum, thicken with sugar until the mixture attains the consistence of a light batter.
To deal out Tom and Jerry to customers:
Take a small bar glass, and to one table-spoonful of the above mixture, add one wine-glass of brandy, and fill the glass with boiling water, grate a little nutmeg on top.
Adepts at the bar, in serving Tom and Jerry, sometimes adopt a mixture of ½ brandy, ¼ Jamaican rum, and ¼ Santa Cruz rum, instead of brandy plain. This compound is usually mixed and kept in a bottle, and a wine-glassful is used in each tumbler of Tom and Jerry.
N. B. – A tea-spoonful of cream of tartar, or about as much carbonate of soda as you can get on a dime, will prevent the sugar from settling to the bottom of the mixture.
This drink is sometimes called Copenhagen, and sometimes Jerry Thomas.

Jerry Thomas, 1862

Jerry Thomas became synonymous with the Tom and Jerry cocktail. Indeed, in his recipe, he says the drink sometimes takes his name. And, during his career, he repeatedly claimed the drink as his own, including an often quoted 1880 interview by a reporter named Alan Dale, an interview repeated almost word for word in Thomas' New York Times obituary, which appears as follows courtesy of David Wondrich's 2015 Imbibe!

One day in... 1847 a gentleman asked me to give him an egg beaten up in sugar. I prepared the article, and then... I thought to myself, 'How beautiful the egg and sugar would be with brandy to it!' I ran to the gentleman and, says I, 'If you'll only bear with me for five minutes I'll fix you up a drink that'll do your heartstrings good.' He wasn't at all averse to having the condition of his heartstrings improved, so back I went, mixed the egg and sugar, which I had beaten up into a kind of batter, with some brandy, then I poured in some hot water and stirred vigorously. The drink realised my expectations. It was the one thing I'd been dreaming of for months... I named the drink after myself, kinder familiarly: I had two small white mice in those days, one of them I called Tom and the other Jerry, so I combined the abbreviations in the drink, as Jeremiah P. Thomas would have sounded rather heavy, and that wouldn't have done for a beverage.

New York Times, 1885

Despite this and many other claims, Jerry Thomas did not create the Tom & Jerry. Again (as is so often the case in matters of cocktail history), we turn to David Wondrich and his excellent Imbibe! where he reprints an article first published 20th March 1827 in the Salem Gazette (Massachusetts). Appearing three years prior to Jerry Thomas' birth, this damning evidence clearly references the Tom and Jerry, both by name and ingredients.

At the police court in Boston, last week, a lad about 13 years of age was tried for stealing a watch, and acquitted. In the course of the trial, it appeared that the prosecutor [the plaintiff] sold to the lad, under the name of "Tom and Jerry," a composition of saleratus [baking soda], eggs, sugar, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and rum. A female witness testified that the boy... appeared to be perfectly deranged, probably in consequence of the 'hell-broth' that he had been drinking.

Salem Gazette, 1827

The above, and other pre-Jerry Thomas references to the Tom & Jerry uncovered by David Wondrich, suggest the cocktail originated in America's New England area, although its true inventor remains unknown. Fact is, if it were not for Jerry Thomas championing this cocktail, the Tom & Jerry would probably also be unknown.

More cocktails by Jerry "The Professor" Thomas