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Hot Buttered Rum
Heat a metal mug, tin dipper or kitchen tumbler and in it dissolve 1 teaspoon of powdered sugar in about 21/2 ounces of boiling water. Then dissolve 1 tablespoon of butter in this and stir in a good sized hooker of New England rum— about 3 ounces. Fill glass to brim with boiling water, stirring the while, and dust well with grated nutmeg.
A single hot drink, built in the vessel it is served from. The proportions are generous by current standards — three ounces of rum is a double.
- "A good sized hooker"Period bar slang for a stiff pour; the recipe helpfully glosses it as about 3 ounces. If that reads as too much, 1.5 to 2 oz gives a drink closer to modern bar practice without unbalancing the butter and sugar.
- New England rumMolasses-based rum distilled in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, drier and rougher than Caribbean styles. A dark or blackstrap rum is the nearest common substitute; aged sipping rum is wasted here.
- Powdered sugarIn older drink books this usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Either dissolves, but superfine sugar keeps the drink from tasting starchy.
- Heat the mug firstThe instruction is not decorative. A cold metal mug draws heat out of a small first pour, which can leave the butter to set into a film rather than emulsify.
- Butter and emulsionA tablespoon of butter is a lot for one drink; stir hard as it melts and again after the final top-up. Left alone it separates and floats as a slick, which is why later versions cream the butter with the sugar and spice first.
- Boiling water twiceAbout 2.5 oz to dissolve the sugar and butter, then more to fill to the brim. With 5.5 oz already in the mug before the top-up, the vessel needs to hold appreciably more than that.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface. Pre-ground nutmeg sinks and tastes flat against the butter.
- YieldOne drink, as written. Scaling up works, but batch the butter-sugar mixture rather than trying to melt butter into several mugs at once.
Hot buttered rum belongs to the long Anglo-American family of hot spirit drinks — flips, toddies, mulls — that were warmed with a heated loggerhead or poker thrust into the mug in colonial taverns. New England rum, distilled from West Indian molasses in Boston, Newport and Medford, was among the cheapest strong drink in the northern colonies and states, which is one reason so many early American recipes name it specifically rather than saying simply "rum." The butter is often explained as a frontier addition for warmth and calories, though buttered ale and buttered wine appear in British drink books well before that; either way it gives the drink body and a soft mouthfeel that sugar alone cannot. Its place in an outdoor cooking book is straightforward: this is what you handed someone coming in from the cold, and a tin dipper over a campfire is all the equipment it needs.