In Britain, though, it is often taken as a soothing bedtime drink, an aid to slumber rather than seduction suggesting that its effects may be as much imagined as real.
Guests are expected to wear blue-light-blocking goggles for 30 minutes before (an early) bedtime, drink a calming tea and practice an evening yoga ritual.
Warm, creamy caramel milk may be served as it is, or you can fortify it with some whiskey, brandy or even a splash of rum for a dreamy bedtime drink.
To make a soothing bedtime drink, add 1 tbsp honey and 1/8 to 1/4 tsp nutmeg to a mug of hot milk and drink right away.
Shane claims that when he was a small child in Tipperary, they gave him two Guinnesses a night as his bedtime drink and later, when he was eight, an uncle introduced him to Powers whiskey.
Warm milk is a very good before bedtime drink.
Educated at Whitgift grammar school, Peter sang on commercial radio as a member of the Ovaltinies, promoting that soothing bedtime drink.
But I came to love it and appreciate the subtle spicing – and years later it's still my bedtime drink of choice.
She's been a nymphomaniac nun (Amateur), a mother who kills her children (Médée), a psychopathic postmistress (La Cérémonie), a woman who makes very suspicious bedtime drinks (Merci pour le Chocolat), and now a piano teacher who craves masochistic humiliation in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher.
The closest thing to "nightfood" I'd ever experienced was my mother's "milk and something" routine as a child I could pick a bedtime snack, so long as I drank a full glass of milk with it.
It was this unique micro-climate that caught the attention of the bedtime-drink manufacturer Colonel Sir James Horlick, who bought Gigha in 1944 to indulge his passion for horticulture, and laid out 52 acres of gardens containing camellias, azaleas and ferns that have no right to grow with such vigour within 3,000 miles of a Hebridean island.
