Hot Buttered Rum

Chap. 240.

To make Buttered Beere, which is good for a cough or shortnesse of winde.

Take a quart or more of double Beere, and put to it a good peece of fresh Butter, Sugar Candie an ounce, of Liquerise in powder, of Ginger grated, of each a dramme, and if you would have it strong, put in as much long Pepper and Greynes, let it boyle in the quart after the manner as you burne wine, and who so will drinke it, let him drinke it as hot as hee may suffer. Some put in the yolke of an egge or two toward the latter end, and so they make it more strengthfull.

a can labeled Buttered Rumme next to a glass of hot buttered rum

Three years ago when I was looking for an excuse to try fat-washing, I remembered that I had transcribed the above recipe from Thomas Cogan’s 1584 book The Haven of Health during some research. It produces a beverage that is kind of interesting as a novelty, but also somewhat unappealing due to the layer of fat floating on top. (I never tried adding an egg and thus making it more strengthfull.)

The spice profile felt like a great starting point for a variation on hot buttered rum, using a fat-washed rum to get the butter flavour without the butterfat. This is the third iteration of the recipe since that initial experiment and I’m pretty happy with where it’s ended up.

Butter the Rum

750 ml (1 bottle) rum. Anything standard proof with a bit of character should work fine.
225 g (8 oz.) unsalted butter

Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium to low heat, then continue cooking it (stirring frequently) until the milk solids are browned. Remove from heat and cool for about ten minutes.

Pour the butter into a quart jar, making sure to scrape all of the solids out of the pan. Add the rum. Shake briefly then let it sit overnight, shaking it occasionally to keep the butter from getting too complacent.

Gently warm the jar in a pot of water until the butter melts. Let it cool, this time without shaking, then place it in the freezer for about an hour. This should produce a solid layer of fat at the top which can easily be removed. Reserve this for cooking or baking (it makes a very nice addition to shortbread.)

Spice the Rum

750 ml butter washed rum
10 g long pepper
5 g grains of paradise
3 g dried ginger
2 g mace
2 g licorice root
1 g red peppercorns

Beyond tweaking the ratios from Cogan’s spice blend, I added mace as a nod to the traditional spices for buttered rum, and ripe peppercorns for more complexity. Substituting nutmeg for the mace and black peppercorns (or cubeb, or even nothing) for the red would be entirely reasonable, but the other somewhat exotic spices are what make this drink distinctive.

Grind the spices and add them to the rum. Infuse for about 24 hours.

Filter the rum. Just an initial filtering with a fine metal sieve is okay-ish for a rustic result, but I prefer taking the time to run it through a coffee filter.

Finish the Drink

750 ml spiced rum
250 ml dry Marsala (or Madeira or sherry)
450 g honey
50 g unsulphured molasses (optional)

For a ready-to-drink version suitable for microwaving in a mug or heating in a pot to ladle out, add water to reach a total volume of 3.5 liters. Alternatively, leave it full strength and dilute about 1:2 with boiling water at serving time.