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Kentucky Hot Brick
This 18th Century recipe has a healthy rival in the Kentucky fox hunters' "hot brick" which originated about the same time and is still growing strong. It is compounded as follows: 3 OUNCES BOILING WATER 1/2 TABLESPOON BUTTER Dissolve together in a silver mug or tin cup.
Stir in granulated sugar to taste.
Stir in 2 or more ounces bourbon whisky.
Sprinkle with nutmeg and drink hot as a red hot brick. We got this recipe from Duncan Hines of Good Eating Adventures fame.
A hot buttered whisky, made a drink at a time in whatever cup is at hand. Two points decide whether it works: the butter must actually emulsify into the water before the bourbon goes in, and the mug must be hot.
- Ounces here are fluid ounces3 ounces boiling water is six tablespoons, a generous third of a cup; 2 ounces bourbon is a little over one standard shot. The half tablespoon of butter is a weight-ish measure, about 7 g, or a thin slice off the stick.
- Warm the vessel firstThree ounces of water in a cold cup drops below serving temperature almost at once. Fill the mug with boiling water, let it stand a minute, dump it, then build the drink.
- Get the butter to emulsifyWhisk or stir hard while the butter melts, before the whisky goes in. Adding cold spirit to unincorporated butter leaves a greasy slick on top instead of a silky body.
- SugarGranulated dissolves in near-boiling water without trouble, though a teaspoon or two of demerara or a small spoon of honey suits bourbon well.
- Add the bourbon off the heatAdd the bourbon last, into water that has come off the boil. Alcohol carries the aroma, and driving it off leaves a flat, sweet water.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatile oil and reads as dust rather than perfume.
- Silver or tinThe recipe names a silver mug or tin cup without saying why; both conduct heat fast and can become too hot to hold. A heavy ceramic mug with a handle keeps the drink hot longer and is easier on the fingers.
- YieldOne drink, roughly 5 ounces. Scale by the cup rather than batching, since the butter separates on standing.
Hot buttered spirits belong to a long British and colonial family of warmed drinks "buttered ale," buttered rum, and the various flips and toddies made for cold weather and cold work, in which butter supplied both body and calories. This version attaches itself to Kentucky fox hunting, an autumn and winter sport that put riders outdoors at dawn, and bourbon was the local spirit at hand; the claim of an eighteenth-century origin is traditional rather than documented. The attribution to Duncan Hines dates the page fairly precisely: Hines was a traveling salesman who, from the 1930s, compiled the guidebooks Adventures in Good Eating and Lodging for a Night, recommending restaurants and inns to motorists. His name was licensed to a cake mix company in the 1950s, which is why most readers now know it from a box rather than from the road guides that made it.