Tom and Jerry

Brandy, rum, hot milk, and spiced egg batter — Pierce Egan's 1821 characters, Jerry Thomas's 1862 popularization, the Upper Midwest's defining Christmas tradition.

The Tom and Jerry is one of the most specifically Christmas-identified drinks in the American tradition, a hot, batter-based punch that requires both advance preparation and tableside assembly. The drink's name comes from the characters Tom (Corinthian Tom) and Jerry (Jerry Hawthorn) in Pierce Egan's 1821 book Life in London, or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom — a portrait of fashionable young men about town in Regency London that became a significant popular success and was adapted for the stage. Egan himself claimed to have invented the cocktail to promote the book, and while this origin story cannot be fully verified, the drink appears in American sources of the 1820s and 1830s with sufficient consistency to suggest an early 19th-century date. Jerry Thomas, who published it in his 1862 Bar-Tenders Guide and later claimed to have created it, is more accurately described as its great American popularizer rather than its inventor — Thomas himself traveled widely and encountered existing drinks rather than inventing them from scratch. The Tom and Jerry batter — beaten eggs with sugar and warming spices, typically including cinnamon, cloves, and allspice — is prepared in advance and held in a communal bowl; individual servings are assembled by adding a measure of the batter to a mug with brandy, rum, and hot milk. The drink became particularly associated with Christmas celebrations in the Upper Midwest, where cities including Milwaukee and Minneapolis maintained a strong Tom and Jerry tradition through the 20th century.