Winter spirits
It may not cure your cold, but a hot toddy sure can warm your heart
It’s January, and all around me in the warren of cubicles, I can hear the human groundhogs wheezing. Sneeze. Hack, hack, hack. Sniffle, sniffle. I try to keep my head down, out of the germ jet stream. I think of the bottle of hand sanitizer I keep in a drawer, a prank one from a puckish colleague, with a label that reads: “Take a sick day, [expletive].” I fantasize about sending it around via the internal mail system.
Also, I think about hot toddies, which for centuries have served as a home remedy for the winter crud.
The source of the toddy’s name is arguable; some think it came from Anglicizing the Indian “tari,” a fermented palm wine. But an 1871 article in the New York Times argues no: The “toddy” is so named for Tod’s Well, which once supplied
water to much of the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, whose inhabitants are no strangers to the art of mixing whisky and water.
Like most classic quaffs, the toddy has crashed into the craft cocktail movement, so now, beyond many excellent traditional versions, you can find the toddy template being executed with spirits from aquavit to slivovitz to mescal, and all sorts of citrus and sweeteners. I’m personally a big fan of using teas in toddies, which add new flavors to the palette; in the case of the Caribbean Breeze Toddy, tart hibiscus tea stands in for lemon juice.
But the classic toddy is as simple as a spec gets: a couple of ounces of spirit topped with boiling water, a spoonful of honey, a wheel of citrus and a bit of spice. The better variations of the classic — which you should make when you’re healthy and just trying to warm up — lean on good aged spirits. I’m talking overproof, funky aged rums; brandies with oomph; feisty, smoky Islay whiskies; any spirits that get mellowed out by the toddy’s softening haze of honey, lemon and steam.
But as comforting as a toddy may be, the notion of a dose of booze as a cold cure has always struck me as a load of hooey. While lemon and honey have some coldalleviating properties, alcohol is a dehydrator, which is not good for you.
I speculate that any curative value of the booze is mostly about adding enough to put you temporarily out of your misery. Beyond that, you might as well just stick to hot tea, honey and lemon — unless you’re looking not for a cure, but simply for a good, warming winter drink.