In winter’s harshest moments, a hot beverage is like a good sweater. But why settle for the minimum? A boozy hot beverage is a sweater backed up by thermal underwear and a wool hat. Not only does it warm you up, it continues heating long after you’ve stepped out into the frost (or massively accelerates a thaw).
When it comes to hot cocktails, though, we have an extremely limited roster of drinks, running pretty much from the Irish Coffee to mulled wine or cider to the Hot Toddy. I love them all, and they do the job. But, for me, there’s one that stands above the rest: Hot Buttered Rum. Not only is it boozily delicious, bringing sweet, spicy warmth with every sip, but it also has an ironclad historical pedigree.
This cozy potion goes all the way back to the early American colonies, where rum was not only the drink of choice, but a lifeblood. Estimates have early colonists drinking between a half pint and a pint of rum a day, with huge amounts of rum going for export. The New England colonies were flooded with molasses, a byproduct of the Caribbean sugar trade, making rum production cheap and easy. Rum was distilled up and down the seaboard, providing, alongside hard cider, a handy, punchy alternative to the iffy water resources of the time.
New England rum production would decline—and beer and whiskey would rise—during and after the Revolution, when the British routinely disrupted American trade with the Caribbean. The rum of the day, however, would have been strong, harsh, and probably only slightly ameliorated by light aging. Adding sweeteners and spices was common, and in the brutal New England winters, hot rum was bolstered by butter. The drink was ubiquitous.
Today Hot Buttered Rum’s major problem is that its unique feature, butter, turns some people off. Without butter, it’s just one of myriad variations on the Hot Toddy. With it, it’s a caloric beast with an oleaginous slick. Oil, as we know, doesn’t mix with water, instead forming a greasy scum on the top. Ungenerous reactions to this drink note as much; revered mid-century writer David Embury wrote in his 1948 classic The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks that “Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst…the lump of butter is the final insult. It blends with the hot rum just about as satisfactorily as warm olive oil blends with champagne!”
However, the butter here is a feature, not a bug. Drinks with butter go back centuries, crossing cultures along the way. The first recorded recipe for “Buttered Beere” dates to 1588. In Tibet, yak butter tea is a staple. Even today, butter-laden “Bulletproof Coffee” is a morning beverage of choice for avid biohackers.
For those who don’t like unintegrated butter in their drinks, there’s a solution. Years ago, the great San Francisco bartender Marcovaldo Dionysus—before he began pulling shifts at Smuggler’s Cove—made me a delicious, sweet, hot rummy drink. I asked him what it was and he said it was HBR. “Where’s the butter?” I asked. “I don’t add butter separately,” he said. “I use a batter.” After a little research, I found HBRs made with a batter have quite a following. Surprisingly, the standard HBR base employs vanilla ice cream, which somehow helps the butter emulsify into the drink.
HBRs made with a batter aren’t true to the original spirit of the drink, but they are delicious and keep the butter-averse happy. Plus, you can keep the batter in the freezer for weeks, using it as needed—which, if the snow piles up, will probably be often.
Hot Buttered Rum, Updated
Ingredients
- ½ cup softened unsalted butter (1 stick)
- 2 cup light brown sugar
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- ½ tsp ground cardamom
- ¼ tsp grated nutmeg
- 1 tsp minced orange zest
- 1 pinch each ground cloves and salt
- 1 qt vanilla ice cream, softened
Instructions
- Add rum* and 2 tablespoons of butter batter to a mug. Top with 4 to 6 ounces of boiling water and stir until integrated.
For the butter batter
- In a bowl, stir together everything but the ice cream, then stir in the ice cream. Transfer to an airtight container, seal it and store it in the freezer until needed.
Notes
Jordan Mackay’s writing on wine, spirits and food has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Decanter, the Art of Eating and many other publications. While Secrets of the Sommeliers, the book he wrote with Rajat Parr, won a James Beard Award in 2011, it’s certain winemakers that he credits with some of his most important tasting lessons.
This story appears in the print issue of February 2017.
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