Tom and Jerry (serves 6)

Classic/vintage · Hot Drinks

4.1 15 ratings

Ingredients

How to make

History

This cocktail serves as a substantial winter meal. The recipe yields enough for six small toddy glasses or Tom & Jerry mugs, each with a 20cl capacity. Given the effort involved, it is advisable to scale the recipe up to serve a larger group or to enjoy multiple servings. Once a common winter drink in American taverns and saloons, the Tom & Jerry cocktail or punch faded into obscurity. Its recent revival is attributed to the broader resurgence of cocktails and its association with Jerry Thomas, especially as a festive Christmas drink. One factor contributing to its decline may be the perceived complexity of its preparation, particularly the 'Tom & Jerry batter' base. Nevertheless, the batter is straightforward to prepare using common kitchen ingredients.

For many years, the Tom & Jerry was credited to Jerry Thomas of the Planter's House Hotel in St. Louis, based on his own assertions of inventing the drink. However, the origins of the Tom & Jerry cocktail predate the famous 'Professor'. While earlier written references exist, the cocktail first appeared in Jerry Thomas' 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 became strongly associated with the Tom & Jerry cocktail. In his own recipe, he states that the drink sometimes bears his name. Furthermore, throughout his career, he repeatedly claimed ownership of the drink. This includes a notable 1880 interview with a reporter named Alan Dale, which was subsequently repeated nearly verbatim in Thomas' New York Times obituary, as presented by David Wondrich in his 2015 Imbibe! publication: "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." Despite these and numerous other claims, Jerry Thomas did not invent the Tom & Jerry. Once again, as is frequently the case with cocktail history, David Wondrich's excellent Imbibe! provides insight, reprinting an article first published on March 20th, 1827, in the Salem Gazette (Massachusetts). This evidence, appearing three years before Jerry Thomas was born, clearly references the Tom and Jerry by both its name and its 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." The aforementioned Salem Gazette article, along with other pre-Jerry Thomas references to the Tom & Jerry discovered by David Wondrich, suggest that the cocktail originated in America's New England region, although its true inventor remains unidentified. In fact, without Jerry Thomas' advocacy for this cocktail, the Tom & Jerry might well be unknown today.

Created by Jerry 'The Professor' Thomas