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Rum-And-Milk
Rum-and-milk, the first thing in the morning or else twice a day, is strongly recommended as of the greatest service in cases of consumption. It is often almost as efficacious as codliver oil. It may be taken with bread and butter, as a meal, at breakfast and tea, if these times are preferred by the invalid. The usual quantities at each period are a tumblerful of rich milk, a table-spoonful of old rum, and a little sugar.
A two-ingredient invalid drink from the era when strong spirits and whole milk were prescribed as nutrition. The proportions are workable; the medical framing is not.
- The medical claim"Consumption" is pulmonary tuberculosis, a bacterial infection. Rum-and-milk has no effect on it, and cod liver oil is not a cure for it either. Treat this as a period drink, not a remedy.
- TumblerfulA Victorian tumbler holds roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so about one cup of milk to a single tablespoon of rum. That is a very dilute drink by modern cocktail standards, which was the point.
- Rich milkMeans unskimmed, cream-rich milk rather than skimmed. Whole milk works; a splash of cream in whole milk gets closer to the original body.
- Old rumAged dark rum, more molasses and less bite than the young spirit of the day. Any decent dark or gold rum suits; heavily spiced rums fight the milk.
- Keeping it from curdlingPour the rum into the milk in a thin stream while stirring, and keep the milk cold or barely warm. Adding milk to a pool of spirit, or heating the mixture after mixing, is what breaks it.
- Sugar"A little" is a scant teaspoon; it dissolves faster in the milk before the rum goes in. A grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate and covers the rawness of the spirit.
- YieldOne glass, made to order. There is no reason to mix a batch ahead, as it separates on standing.
Invalid cookery occupied whole chapters of nineteenth-century household books, and its logic was straightforward: a wasting patient needed calories, and milk fortified with spirits delivered them in a form a weak appetite could manage. Cod liver oil, to which Cassell's compares the drink, was genuinely popular from the mid-1800s onward as a treatment for consumption and rickets, and it did carry vitamins A and D that a sunless urban diet lacked. Rum-and-milk carried nothing but fat, sugar and alcohol, though against a disease that killed by emaciation the fat and sugar were not entirely pointless. The habit of dosing invalids with spirits in milk was widespread rather than specific to any one authority; antibiotics ended the medical version of it.