Hot Buttered Rum

Hot Buttered Rum is a warm colonial American winter drink — dark rum dissolved in boiling water with a pat of butter, brown sugar and warming spices, stirred in a heated mug until the butter melts to a thin slick across the surface. It is one of the oldest of the hot toddies, a heavy, comforting cold-weather drink that tastes of caramel, baking spice and rich rum, with the butter giving it a soft, rounded mouthfeel found in almost no other cocktail. It belongs to the long winter and the holidays — a fireside drink rather than a bar-rail one — and survives today much as it was poured in the taverns of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England.