Last weekend I discovered coquito<\/i>, also known as “Puerto Rican egg nog,” even though it contains no eggs and is really nothing like egg nog.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine, of Puerto Rican descent, posted a photograph to Facebook of a Starbucks sign for a coquito frappuccino. Now, I’ve not been in a Starbucks in a while so I’ve no idea if this photo were of recent vintage or from a previous holiday season. All that matters is that I was intrigued to discover that Puerto Rico has a traditional (and very good) Christmas drink<\/a>, especially when my friend said that, to be authentic, it had to have rum.<\/p>\n I had rum!<\/p>\n Naturally, I spent an hour researching recipes online. (To my surprise, To Have and Have Another<\/i>, a book of Ernest Hemingway-related cocktail recipes I wrote about here<\/a>, had nothing on this Caribbean rum drink.) The most promising one I found (and probably the easiest) was this one from The Noshery<\/a>.<\/p>\n I had the rum, I had the spices, I had the vanilla. All I needed was evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cream of coconut. To the grocery store I went, I went to the liquor store and picked up another bottle of rum just to be on the safe side, and half an hour later things were blending in my kitchen.<\/p>\n An empty 1.75 liter vodka bottle from 360 Vodka<\/a> was pressed into service to hold my Christmas drink.<\/p>\n I sampled my batch. I poured a little into an Irish Cream glass and sniffed it. A definite rum scent. It certainly looked<\/i> like egg nog. It had the same creamy complexion. I took a swallow. It was a little gritty, probably due to the cream of coconut. The coconut flavor came through strongly, and the warmth of the rum was there. It tasted nothing<\/i> like egg nog, not even the alcoholic egg nog you can buy at the liquor store. It was so good<\/i>.<\/p>\n And I still had rum! I could make more! Admittedly, some of it was Admiral Nelson’s<\/a> Vanilla Rum, which would work, since the recipe called for vanilla. (I should note that, no matter what the label on a bottle of Admiral Nelson’s implies, Horatio Nelson was never<\/i> a bearded, jaunty, eye-patch wearing fellow.)<\/p>\n So, back to the grocery store I went. More evaporated milk, more condensed milk, more cream of coconut.<\/p>\n Adding the ingredients to the blender was a blast, because they would separate out into layers. I had never worked with cream of coconut before, so I was amazed to discover the solid, fatty layer that condensed at the top of the can like a plug.<\/p>\n Suffice it to say, I made coquito<\/i> until I ran out of rum, which produced two 1.75 liter vodka bottles and most of a 750 mL rum bottle (which I had drained in the process of all this blending).<\/p>\n In the week since, I’ve drunk the coquito<\/i> from the rum bottle in small doses, usually out of an Irish Cream glass. There’s a nice texture to coquito<\/i>, the rum isn’t overpowering, and the coconut is simply divine.<\/p>\n The two giant bottles? I’ll take them out of the refrigerator, give them a good shake, and put them back. The cinnamon and nutmug have settled to the bottom of the bottle. I have all December to drink these (and the bourbon barrel-aged Guinness<\/i> I picked up two weeks ago). I’m in no hurry.<\/p>\n Even if I did drink all of the coquito<\/i>, well… the store has more ingredients, and I have a blender. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n If you’ve never heard of coquito<\/i>, really, do<\/i> try that Noshery recipe<\/a>; you might actually give up egg nog forevermore.<\/p>\n My Puerto Rican friends, I’ve appropriated your culture, but when it’s for a drink this good, how could I not?<\/p>\n Happy December, everyone!<\/p>\n Post header photo, An Irish Girl at the Christmas Market<\/a>, by Mike Kniec, licensed Creative Commons BY 2.0<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last weekend I discovered coquito, also known as “Puerto Rican egg nog,” even though it contains no eggs and is really nothing like egg nog. A friend of mine, of Puerto Rican descent, posted a photograph to Facebook of a Starbucks sign for a coquito frappuccino. Now, I’ve not been in a Starbucks in aContinue reading “Some Christmas Cultural Appropriation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4706,4705,4707,4446],"class_list":["post-31620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-coquito","tag-egg-nog","tag-puerto-rico","tag-rum","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}