I am an Ashkenazi Jew but have never heard about gogl-mogl—a traditional cold remedy—until today. I'm quite familiar with the magic of Jewish penicilin—aka chicken soup—but gogl-mogl wasn't on the medical menu for me growing up. From National Public Radio:
Also called goggle-moggle, kogel mogel, guggle muggle, גאָגל-מאָגל, the drink is basically like a hot eggnog, or sabayon, thinned out to be drinkable[…]
Eve Jochnowitz, a Yiddish teacher and Jewish culinary ethnographer, jokes that gogl-mogl "seems to be one of those things like chicken soup – it's always been there."
Jochnowitz says the most common version begins with sugar or honey mixed with egg yolks, and then beaten into hot milk.
There are slightly different versions – sometimes a shot of brandy or slivovitz was thrown in; sometimes chocolate or butter was added. Jochnowitz says gogl-mogl was found across Europe.
"Over the entire Yiddish-speaking world – from Czechoslovakia in the West, as far as the borders of the Russian Empire in the East, I would say."
Does it relieve cold symptoms though?
"We don't have any really good evidence that honey does a whole lot for cough," explains University of Virginia pediatrician Diane Pappas. "There is some suggestion that just the fact that you have some kind of viscous liquid kind of coating and calming and soothing your throat and increasing saliva and whatever, that those things can also help comfort someone with a cough or cold symptoms… I don't know that there are downsides – unless you put the alcohol in it."
Some might call that the upside.
