Christmas traditions
Eggnog, Rum, and Old Doctor Reid
A 100-year-old, retired Navy doctor shares his secret recipe
When I lived in Coronado, CA, I would often go next door to make sure my elderly neighbor was okay. My neighbor was a retired Navy physician, and my husband (at that time) was a Naval officer (usually away on long deployments) so we had some things in common that helped to start conversations.
Dr. Reid was 100 years old, and loved to tell me stories of his long career as a physician in the USN. He lived alone, and had someone come in to clean, but I knew that he didn’t always have the energy to cook meals, and I would often bring over some food, and sit for some conversation.
It was important to him to “give something back”, and he would treat me to artichokes fresh from his back garden. He was a stickler about proper preparation of the cynara cardunculus, and took care to present the perfectly cooked specimen plated with his homemade mayonnaise for dipping.
One day, Dr. Reid told me the story of serving on a Navy ship off the coast of Jamaica in the 1920’s. The sailors would often go into town to buy rum. He was a young man, a long way from home on Christmas Day, and fondly remembered the ship’s cook whipping up eggnog, complete with Jamaican rum, for…
