“Does it really have butter, or is that just a lie?”

By the time I had clarified this, I was well on my way to making my 10th hot buttered rum of the night. Unrelated in taste to butterscotch — which, in turn, is apparently unrelated to scotch at all — buttered rum is similar to scotch in style; it is an incredibly domestic production. If my grandmother mixed drinks, I could imagine her making these after we’d had a long day of sledding — heating the apple cider on a back burner while she pulled cookies out of the oven.

You can tell just how idealized this is — not by the fact that this would entail my grandmother giving a child alcohol, but by the fact that one of my grandmothers lived on a pancake-flat beach that flooded yearly, the other in the not-so-deep South. The closest I ever got to sledding around either of them was playing with novelty snow globes.

Hot Buttered Rum

1 teaspoon honey

1 whole clove or 1 pinch ground cloves

About 1/2 tsp cinnamon, to taste

2 oz dark (or spiced or gold) rum

1/2-1 tsp unsalted butter

4 oz apple cider

1 cinnamon stick

Before doing anything else, heat the cider in a microwave or over low heat on a stove. As with other hot drinks, it should be heated enough to melt the honey and butter, but not so hot that it burns your mouth. While it’s heating, put the honey, cloves, cinnamon and butter into a large mug or small glass. If possible, cut the butter into thinnish slices before adding it to the glass; the heat of the cider will melt the butter once they’re mixed, but it still helps to increase the surface area.

Once the cider is hot, pour it into the mug and stir to dissolve the honey and butter. Last, add the rum and stir again, then garnish with a cinnamon stick. The initial recipe I used (from Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology) called for dark or spiced rum. While both of these will work, the problem with spiced rum is that unless you’re the kind of person who really enjoys spiced rum, you’ll have an entire bottle of the stuff to go through later. I happened to have Appleton’s Jamaican rum available, so that’s what I used — it was a gold rum, not a dark (dark rums having been aged longer, giving them a more intense flavor), but it worked well and still managed to come through the competing flavors of spices and apple. I’d avoid using light rum, though — it won’t give you the rich flavor you’re looking for.

As one of my friends pointed out, hot buttered rum should be about as close as you can come to Harry Potter’s butterbeer, with the (presumable) addition of hard alcohol. But what would real butterbeer taste like? What subtle complexities from the wizarding world still evaded me? Out of curiosity, I checked and found the following recipe:

Butterbeer (from Mugglenet)

1 cup club soda or cream soda

1/2 cup butterscotch syrup (ice cream topping)

1/2 tablespoon butter

Microwave the syrup and sugar, then stir in the soda and serve in mugs.

On second thought, I don’t think I’m missing much. I guess I’ll have to wait for the Twilight cocktail.