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Drink

Hot Spiced Rum

A warm alcoholic beverage made with rum, spices, butter, water, sugar, egg yolks, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Hot Spiced Rum

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the spices with butter and hot water in a bowl.

  2. Boil the water with cloves, coriander seeds, and cinnamon in a separate pot.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the rum, sugar, egg yolks, and lemon juice in a tumbler.

  2. Strain the spiced water into the tumbler and whisk everything together.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,498 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Coriander + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + coriandertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Old rum
Provides the base spirit and most of the alcoholic warmth of the drink.
Egg yolks
Add richness and a smooth, creamy body to the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the spices and the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the drink and cuts its richness.
Butter
Adds fat that carries the spice aromas and rounds out the mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Strain the spiced water into the tumbler and whisk everything together. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble when hot liquid is added too quickly. Adding the spiced water gradually while whisking helps the yolks blend smoothly into the drink.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, rum, sugar, egg, lemon, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, rum, sugar, egg, lemon, clove, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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