the.com/hot toddy
Medicine that only works because it's also a cocktail.
means A warm drink of spirits (usually whisky), hot water, honey or sugar, and spices or lemon, sipped as a comfort for colds or cold nights.
from Likely from 'toddy,' meaning the sap of a palm tree, tapped and fermented into a drink — from Hindi 'tari,' sap of the tar (palm) tree. English drinkers in colonial India borrowed the word for the palm liquor, and it drifted home to mean any sweetened spirit-and-water mix. Add hot water and spices and you get the version your grandmother swore cured colds — really it just makes you not care about the cold.
- origin story
- named after Edinburgh's Tod's Well water source
- real ingredient
- whiskey, honey, lemon, hot water, zero science
- actual cure rate
- none, you just stop caring you're sick
- best part
- doctors can't technically forbid it