Hot Toddy

The story of the Hot Toddy begins within the dampened streets of Edinburgh. As legend has it, the first hot toddies were made within Edinburgh’s pubs by mixing Scotch whiskey with a splash of hot water. This water was said to have been sourced from Tod’s Well, the largest well in the area, and giving the drink its name. These drinks were very popular during the 18th centuries, when they were used as a way to ward off the unrelenting Scottish cold.

Although this version of the legend seems quite plausible, it’s more likely that hot toddies truly began in British-occupied India. The word “taddy” in Hindi, which referred to a beverage made from fermented palm sap, actually dates back to as early as the 1610s, long before the Scots began serving the drinks in their pubs. This wine then developed into arrack with the invention of the still. By the mid-18th century, a taddy in India had come to refer to a “beverage made of alcoholic liquor with hot water, sugar, and spices.”

Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown’s book Spirituous Journey suggests the British use of the term dates back to around 1671, and that it is often used in conjunction with punch, and later grog, as terms for mixed drinks, often having similar recipes. It is likely these names and recipes were brought back by the British Navy, after which the drink found a natural home in Scotland, with its cold winters and ready supply of whisky. The first use in American print documented by David Wondrich in Imbibe! dates back to 1750, while the first recipe he identifies from Samuel Stearn’s American Herbal in 1801.

To make matters more confusing, Wondrich also raises the issue of the similarity between the terms toddy, sling and skin, deciding that the difference lies in the fact that a “toddy was perceived as a hot drink that you could also make cold, and a sling as a cold one that you could also make hot”; addition of lemon peel made it a skin. Not only that, but a rum toddy (without lemon) could also be known as a Bombo or Bumboo.

And the hot toddy, in its heady simplicity, is one of the last remaining links to the incunabula of pre-19th-century drinking habits, a cocktail that pre-dates the very term. Clearly the toddy significantly pre-dates the use of the word cocktail. Whatever the actual origin may be, by the time the colonists were forced to brave the blustery New England winters, a Hot Toddy was considered the only acceptable remedy. The drink was typically served in large bowls to be shared by multiple patrons, and piping hot. In the colonies, the traditional recipe morphed slightly, combining rum, sugar, and spices with water, rather than whiskey. And in some pubs, the recipe even featured a combination of egg yolks and rum.

Here's one first hand description of the drink. In 1805, having become the first professor of chemistry at Yale University, Benjamin Silliman traveled to the British Isles to get up to international speed on the subject he had been hired to teach. Silliman also took the opportunity to observe the social mores of his hosts, duly reporting the habit at the end of dinners ("when they are meant to be hospitable") of "the drinking of hot toddy."

A pitcher of hot water is placed upon the table, and each guest is furnished with a large foot-glass holding nearly a pint, in which he mixes his water, spirits and sugar, in such proportions as he pleases; whisky is preferred on these occasions, but that of the highlands, which is the best, is so expensive, in consequence of the excise, that it is not universally used.

Each foot-glass has a small wooden ladle, which is employed to dip the hot toddy out, into wine glasses, from which it is drunk.

As we can see the Hot Toddy defies formula, encouraging each drinker to adjust to both their own preference and the needs of the moment. What kind of spirits? How much hot water? (I like a 2-to-1 water-to-alcohol ratio, but that's just me.) How sweet? (I like a half-teaspoon of sugar per ounce of water, but that's just me.) Citrus or no citrus? (I like to boil the water with a slice of lemon, but, again, &c., &c.) Incidentally, true drinking savants may insist that a toddy with lemon is properly called a skin.

Toddy, properly distilled into brandy-like form, was called arrack—as was various other distillations from Southeast Asia, of sugarcane, of rice, of fruit. (In some sources, "toddy" becomes a generic term for anything distilled into arrack.) In the 19th century, arrack was a de rigueur ingredient for punch—the possibly spurious etymology of "punch" as deriving from the Hindi panch, or five, is derived from the basic five-ingredient punch recipe: arrack, tea, sugar, water, lemon.

The Old Fashioned is a decendent of the Hot Toddy.

Hot Toddy recipe as it appears in Jerry Thomas' 1862 Bar-Tender's Guide:

1 tea-spoonful of fine white sugar
1 wine-glass of brandy

Dissolve the sugar in a little boiling water, add the brandy, and pour boiling water into the glass until it is two-thirds full. Grate a little nutmeg on top.

The rum toddy reached its apotheosis at the hands of the legendary Charles H. Baker, Jr., playboy and epicure, who included in his collection The Gentleman's Companion (1939), the Baker "Horse Collar," "ORIGINATED."

The Baker "Horse Collar"

"Tin cups for mariners, silver julep cups for fancies
Carta de Oro Bacardi, Jamaica, Barbados, or Haitian rum, 2 jiggers
Orange peel, 1 to each cup, cut in unbroken spiral
Brown sugar, 1 tsp per cup
Whole cloves, 6; or powdered clove, 1/4 tsp per cup
Boiling water, enough to fill
Butter, 1/2 tsp, optional

Line cups with spirals of orange peel, first dipping them in rum to moisten. Dust sugar on peel, then cloves the same. Put a jigger of rum in each cup, put cups on hot stove, and after a moment set aflame. Let burn until edges of peel start to brown and sugar to caramel. Blow out. Take off stove, add other jigger of rum, fill up with hot water, give a brief stir and serve—either with or without a lump of butter on top the size of a hazelnut."