Skip to main content
Drink

Bum Flip

A frothy ale and rum cocktail with lemon, sugar, ginger, nutmeg, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bum Flip

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Rub the rind of the lemon with the sugar and place it in a jug with the spices and rum.

  2. Carefully break the four eggs into the jug and beat everything together until frothy.

Add the ale and serve

  1. Heat the ale until just boiling, then pour it into a separate jug.

  2. Froth the ale into the jug with the other ingredients, passing it back and forth until smooth and creamy.

  3. Serve and enjoy once it has cooled enough.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Rum + nutmegtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together646 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Rum + gingertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten into the drink to create a frothy, creamy body and a rich texture.
Ale
Forms the liquid base, and heating it helps it blend smoothly with the eggs.
Rum
Adds spirit strength and warm flavour to the drink.
White sugar
Sweetens the drink and softens the sharpness of the rum and ale.
Lemon
Its rind, rubbed with sugar, adds aromatic citrus oils to the drink.

The step that matters

Heating the ale. Ale should be brought just to boiling, not beyond, so it stays hot enough to blend smoothly with the eggs without scrambling them. Pouring it in gradually while frothing keeps the eggs from curdling.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, lemon, sugar, nutmeg, egg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipes