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Texas Stew, or Nevada Stew
This alternative buttered bourbon was originally called Texas Stew, but when John Sparks was Governor of Nevada he popularized and poured it at many a round up and camp meeting, under its adopted name-Nevada Stew: 3 OUNCES WATER 1/2-1 TABLESPOON BUTTER 3 OUNCES CORN LIKKER GRANULATED SUGAR TO TASTE A PINCH EACH OF ALLSPICE, CINNAMON AND CLOVES Put everything in a tin cup or dipper, bring to simmering point, preferably over a camp fire, but don't let it boil. This unholy little trinity of all-American drinks is worthy of inclusion in anybody's list of secret sins.
A hot buttered whiskey in the mold of hot buttered rum, sized for a single tin cup. It comes together in about three minutes, and the whole thing turns on heat control.
- Never let it boilSimmering point only. A boil drives off the alcohol and, more visibly, breaks the butter so it floats in a greasy slick instead of staying suspended. Pull it the moment the surface trembles.
- Corn likkerUnaged corn whiskey — legal versions are sold as white dog, white whiskey or moonshine, usually 80 to 100 proof. Bourbon works and is what the headnote calls it; it will taste rounder and sweeter than the original intended.
- ProportionsThree ounces water to three ounces spirit is a stiff one-to-one. Six ounces of liquid plus butter about two-thirds fills a standard mug; scale the water up if you want something you can drink slowly by a fire.
- The butterHalf a tablespoon is enough to gloss the surface; a full tablespoon gives a richer, heavier body. Unsalted is preferable, since salted butter reads oddly against the sugar and clove.
- SpicesGround spices will cloud the drink and settle as grit at the bottom. A short cinnamon stick, two or three whole cloves and a few allspice berries steeped in the hot water for a minute, then fished out, give a cleaner result.
- Sugar to tasteStart at two teaspoons and dissolve it in the water before the spirit and butter go in. Undissolved sugar in a tin cup over coals scorches at the bottom.
- VesselA tin cup set at the edge of a fire heats unevenly and fast. Indoors, use the smallest saucepan you own over low heat and pour into a warmed mug — a cold mug drops the temperature enough to congeal the butter.
- YieldOne drink.
Hot buttered spirits are an old cold-weather habit in English and American drinking, the butter and sugar doing for whiskey what they had long done for rum and for hot spiced ale. John Sparks, the Nevada cattleman who served as the state's governor from 1903 until his death in 1908, made his name on the range before he made it in Carson City, and drinks of this kind — assembled from what a chuckwagon might actually carry, namely water, sugar, butter, whiskey and a spice tin — belong to that world. The rebranding from Texas to Nevada is the sort of regional reattribution that follows cowboy recipes across state lines, and the attribution to Sparks is traditional rather than documented. "Corn likker" points to unaged, locally distilled whiskey, a drink more strongly associated with the South and Appalachia than the West, though it was drunk widely enough before Prohibition made the word conspiratorial.