Hot buttered Malört

Here's a holiday toast to your sweet, sweet, asses and a big toast up mine

Good day, ding dongs, and greetings to all of you new readers!

Before I go on, where on Earth did all of you come from?

Last week I almost got 100 new subscribers in less than a day, which is beyond anything I’ve ever gotten at once. I scoured Twitter and there were no answers there. Was it Instagram? Facebook? A mention on a YouTube video? If you subscribed last week, please leave me a comment, because I’m still absolutely baffled.

Hope you all had as good of a Thanksgiving as could be expected. Davida, Nugget, and I just made some video calls to family and had a delicious monster meal that we purchased from a few different restaurants around Chicago. Then we played a shitload of video games all weekend. We miss our families very much, but goddammit, we’re dedicated to help stop this fuckin’ thing.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, we’ve officially hit holiday season. I went to the grocery store tonight to run some errands and found that the ambient music has flipped over to Christmas stuff. As soon as I heard the tunes, my ears started bleeding, and I don’t remember how I got home with all our groceries intact and my pants missing.

Here’s the miniature fuzzy gang, wishing you all well. For some reason Mr. Bee looks absolutely miserable in this picture.

I was throwing around some ideas in my head for this week’s disaster, and said to Davida, cackling, “How about some hot buttered gravy for sipping on? That sounds terrible.”

I got a shrug and I felt a deep sadness in my soul. Apparently I’m not as hilarious as I thought. The next day, she said, “Wait. How about hot buttered Malört?”

I stopped dead in my tracks and said, “That’s perfect.”

Sometimes I, the great Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, can come up short and I must admit my shortcomings. This is why I rely on Davida for all the good shit and you all rely on me for the good looks.

See? So handsome.

Now, there are likely more than a few of you saying, “Malört? What the fuck is that?”

Malört is a wormwood-flavored liqueur that is a regional bar staple here in Chicago. This shit has a wild flavor that is nearly indescribable in the English language. Back in the days when we could all spit in each other’s faces while shouting loudly in a packed bar, this was a shot we’d buy each other to either show some sort of friendly solidarity, to celebrate the end of a long work shift, or to show your out-of-town guest how much you hate their ass.

Everyone has a different way to describe it. My description is that it tastes like burnt rubber bands soaked in grapefruit juice. When I have it, it’s not because I love it, it’s because I respect it. It tastes like a bitter divorce, and I don’t even know what a divorce is like. Malört is an experience and nobody is sure if it’s a good one.

Hot buttered rum is a weird holiday drink, so there’s no reason why hot buttered Malört couldn’t be any weirder.

What kind of degenerate sits around sipping on a mug full of heated alcohol and butter? Whoever came up with this recipe should be applauded forever.

I used this one from Food Network. It’s got butter, brown sugar, honey, and some spices whipped together before you pour alcohol and hot water in.

A fun way to warm up your butter during the winter is by putting it on a vent while the heater’s going.

Then, if you’ve forgotten about it like I did, your cat will alert you to the fact that it’s still there by going up to it and biting the bag.

Really, the recipe couldn’t be easier after that. Dump the butter in with the dry ingredients and whip that shit together until it’s a rough batter.

This is my electric hand mixer. It is a trustworthy kitchen companion of mine even though I do not need to use it very often.

My friend Joe gave this to me as a gift around 10 years ago (more like he was getting rid of it because he didn’t ever cook). Then he died. These events are unrelated. One thing about Joe is that he could not understand the concept of dubstep music. Why dubstep? I’m not entirely sure.

When a random song would come on the radio, and I’m talking random, like folk, blues, polka, you name it, he’d sometimes turn it down, look at me, and ask, “Is this dubstep?”

I’d always say no, because whenever he asked, it was never dubstep. I tried to explain that dubstep is the kind of electronic music with the kind of bassline that gives you instantaneous diarrhea, then I played him examples.

He still never understood.

Basically when you’re done whipping the ingredients together, you’ve created a rough buttercream of sorts.

You can either choose to frost your nipples with it or continue with the recipe. If you choose to frost your nipples, please start a Substack newsletter and I will champion the shit out of it.

After you’re done with the batter, move it to a heatproof vessel and add the alcohol along with some boiling water.

To some people Malört is like “fuck you” in a bottle, but for the most part people in Chicago celebrate the shit out of it. I have a feeling we’ll be sitting on this bottle for a long time. Maybe I’ll buttchug it and report back later.

The final result will look and smell like a nice warm holiday drink with no evidence of what lies beneath.

Harvey took in some of the fumes, got wasted, and ran outside. We haven’t seen him since. If any of you see him please call me.

I took a sniff. It smelled great. I mean, it’s spiced sweetened butter (some recipes use melted ice cream, which I can attest to being pretty good). Then I cautiously took my first sip. It was wonderful and tasted like the holidays, smooth and rich, and for a second, it was good enough for me to forget the fact that this mug contained a quarter stick of liquid butter. Then the aftertaste kicked in, and goddamn, it was just purely bitter. Just imagine a Starbucks chai latte with some turpentine syrup thrown in, and congratulations, you know what this tasted like. I handed the mug over to Davida and she asked if she could have the rest of it, for what it’s worth.

Still, I can’t stop thinking about it. Was it good? I honestly don’t know. Would I drink it again? Yes. Yes I would.

Next winter if things are a little better and all of you can come visit, maybe I’ll fix you a mug. It’ll be like a big fuck you. But, in a loving Chicago sort of way.

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Stick around, everyone, because part two drops on Friday for paid subscribers only: Get ready for, wait for it, Hot Buttered Mouthwash.

If you all enjoyed what you read today, the second best thing you can do for me is post this to social media. Twitter, Facebook, your company Slack instance, where you will be sternly reprimanded by HR to not post offensive links, wherever. Or mention it on your podcast or something. Seriously, where are all of you new readers from?

And of course, this goes to all of you, consider paying for the full experience to support the newsletter along with, well, our little pod of two humans and one Big Handsome Boy Nugget.

And as a last fun thing, for some inexplicable reason, one of my articles from The Takeout showed up on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last week. What the fuck?

The show doesn’t mention me by name, so no, that’s not where all the random traffic came from. But it is weird hearing Stephen Colbert read what you wrote on network television, and double weird seeing a photo of your lunch also show up on the same screen.

See some of you on Friday, and I love you all.