Feature article
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For the Florences, eggnog stirs up memories
By Fred Sauceman
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L-R: Kaye, Joe, and daughter Carter Florence serve eggnog in their 19th century home in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Carter is adding the “nog.” Fred Sauceman photo.
EGGNOG RECIPE
6 eggs at room temperature
¾ cup sugar, divided
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 pint half-and-half or whipping cream
Whole milk
Half gallon vanilla ice cream
Freshly grated nutmeg to taste
Rum or bourbon to taste
Beat egg yolks with ½ cup sugar. Add vanilla, half-and-half, and enough milk to make 1½ quarts of liquid. Beat egg whites and ¼ cup sugar until stiff. Fold egg white mixture into milk mixture and add the ice cream. Guests can add nutmeg and rum or bourbon to taste. |
It was Christmas 1983, and Joe Florence had just been assigned, as a National Health Service Corps doctor, to Ary, Kentucky, working at a clinic in a community called Homeplace. Dark came early in the one-stop-sign town surrounded by mountains.
Joe and his wife Kaye were hosting a Christmas party, and when they looked out into that darkness, they spotted a lady bearing a punch bowl. It was Joe’s colleague, Calla Bassett, and she’d brought eggnog.
“My experience with eggnog previously had not been very memorable,” Joe recalls.
That changed once he tasted Calla’s recipe, brought to Eastern Kentucky from Upstate New York. Now eggnog, in the Florence family, is all about memory.
Joe claims he’s “not much of a cook,” but his rendition of his friend’s recipe has been repeated every year since he first tasted it.
Joe eventually gave up his practice as a country doctor in Appalachian Kentucky, eventually settling in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town, in a house built by a North Carolina privateer around 1820. He now directs rural medicine programs for East Tennessee State University.
Students call him for advice on such topics as diabetes education in the mountains, but they’re just as likely to phone him for the eggnog recipe, after he and Kaye have served it at an end-of-the-semester party, always in their silver punch bowl.
“For our 25th wedding anniversary, Joe got real excited about silver, and so the silver punch bowl was my anniversary present,” Kaye says. “When our older daughter Maggie got married, Joe thought she and her husband should have a silver punch bowl as well, so for their first Christmas, that was his present to them.
“Both our girls live in Kentucky now, and between sorority functions, family parties and church activities, I think their punch bowl’s been used about as often as ours.”
Since younger daughter Carter had talked about it among her friends at Centre College in Danville, she decided to bring some eggnog back after Thanksgiving one year.
“They wouldn’t drink it because of the raw eggs, and I was so insulted,” Carter remembers. “I brought this eggnog four and a half hours back to Danville and my friends wouldn’t touch it. I even brought freshly ground nutmeg.”
Considering his medical knowledge, I asked Joe about the raw eggs.
“Most of the time raw eggs are safe, particularly raw eggs you buy in a grocery store, because they go through lots of safety checks.”
Each year, with a group of medical students, Joe travels to Johnson City’s sister city, Guaranda, Ecuador, where he purchases a bottle of vanilla extract, as thick as honey. So thick, in fact, that he has to scrape it out of the measuring cup when he adds it to the eggnog.
The Florences like this eggnog recipe because guests can drink it or eat it. The final addition to the bowl is a half gallon of vanilla ice cream.
“And one of the things about this eggnog is the way you serve it,” Joe says. “In my family, the adult eggnog is said to have ‘nog’ in it. So you have regular eggnog you serve for everybody, including the children. And then some of the adults get a little something extra, the ‘nog.’”
A shot glass with a Christmas tree on it sits inconspicuously beside the punch bowl, and Carter says you just make sure people don’t watch as you pour in some rum or whiskey.
“Joe is particularly fond of Kentucky bourbon, so we often have a decanter of it out as well, and folks can just doctor the eggnog up however they’re inclined,” adds Kaye.
Guests in the Florence home, like the choir members from Jonesborough Presbyterian Church, sprinkle nutmeg over their cups of eggnog from seashell-shaped salt cellars that were given to Kaye by a college friend from Appalachian State University. The nutmeg grater is an inheritance from her late mother, Edith Carter Wood.
“It has a little place in the top to store the nutmegs in, and it’s just very nostalgic for me to use that and remember the years she helped make the eggnog and enjoyed drinking it,” Kaye reflects.
Around the Florence table each Christmas, eggs, sugar, milk, cream, vanilla and ice cream stir memories that range from Eastern Kentucky to Ecuador.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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