Tom and Jerry

Jerry Thomas opened his 1862 bar guide with the Tom and Jerry. Not as the first recipe, but as the spiritual centerpiece — the drink he returned to in performance and in print as proof that American bartending was a craft worthy of a book.

The Tom and Jerry is a hot egg punch built in two stages. First, a spiced batter of beaten eggs, powdered sugar, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and a preserving measure of Jamaican rum is prepared in quantity. Then, to order, a tablespoon of batter is placed in a warmed goblet, brandy and rum are added, and the whole is filled with boiling water or hot milk. Grated nutmeg finishes it. Thomas wrote: "This preparation is attributed to the author of this work, and was first manufactured by him at the Planters' House, St. Louis, in the year 1847."

The claim is contested. Punch historian David Wondrich found references to a hot egg drink called "Tom and Jerry" in American newspapers of the 1820s, likely borrowing the name from Pierce Egan's enormously popular 1821 serial "Life in London," whose protagonists Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn lent their names to a generation of hot egg punches. What Thomas definitively did was codify the recipe, attach his personal mythology to it, and promote it with theatrical flair unmatched by any bartender before or since.

At his San Francisco saloon at 15 Montgomery Street — and later at his New York establishments — Thomas kept a gleaming silver punch bowl of batter during winter. He refused to open the bowl until the first flake of snow fell, creating the kind of manufactured scarcity that made people line up. The spectacle worked: the Tom and Jerry was considered THE winter drink in New York in the 1860s and 1870s.

At his San Francisco saloon at 15 Montgomery Street — and later at his New York establishments — Thomas kept a gleaming silver punch bowl of batter during winter.

Post-Prohibition, the drink survived in modified form in Midwestern diners, particularly in Wisconsin and Minnesota, often prepared with whiskey or even fruit syrups rather than brandy and rum. These regional versions diverged significantly from Thomas's original but kept the egg-batter structure alive through the cocktail dark ages.

The craft renaissance restored the original. Wondrich's 2007 "Imbibe!" — the first serious modern scholarship on Thomas — sparked a wave of historically accurate recreations. Today the Tom and Jerry appears on seasonal menus each winter at bars committed to historical programming, served in the warmed goblets Thomas specified.