It’s a time of year for all things pumpkin, so why not a cocktail, too?

We had a delicious “rumpkin” at Willow Room in Chicago and with a little help from their bartender, I have come up with a close facsimile.

“Rumpkin” is a mashup of rum and pumpkin. The former is the easy part, the latter required some syrup making.

Pumpkin Syrup

When it comes to getting a pumpkin syrup you have three options ranging from the ridiculously simple to the experimental.

At the easy, hardly adventurous end of the spectrum is to simply buy one. Syrup makers Torani or Monin seem like reasonable places to start, though I can’t vouch for either.

The middle ground, which I chose, was to concoct a brown sugar simple syrup then fortify it with actual pumpkin. Here, you have two choices: canned or boxed pumpkin pie mix, which already includes a nice blend of autumnal species (but also sugar), or unadulterated pumpkin purée, into which you will need to add your own spice blend to get the pumpkin flavor you and your guests will expect.

By disposition, I’m naturally inclined to a “build your own” approach, but in this case I decided against the plain pumpkin purée route. As I see it, there is just too much to consider when trying to strike the right balance between allspice, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and stronger spice flavors like clove. Sure, if I were making a pie, I’d use the plain purée so I could control how much sugar winds up in the end product, but since we’re making a sweet syrup anyhow, the added sugar in the pumpkin pie mix didn’t concern me. I went with Farmer’s Market Foods, Organic Canned Pumpkin Pie Mix, which consists of pumpkin purée, cane sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

Choosing A Rum

Derived from sugarcane and carrying with it a long history, rum is the top-selling spirit in the world. Even during America’s colonial period, rum produced in New England and New York from molasses of the West Indies was the most popular distilled beverage in the land. Historically, rum played an ignominious role in the triangle trade of those days.

Uniquely for spirits, rum is available in both clear (fermented in stainless steel tanks) and dark varieties (aged in oak barrels). For the rumpkin you’ll want the dark version and for mine I stuck with Willow Room’s choice, Don Q Gran Anejo Rum from Puerto Rico. It’s from there that the vast majority of rums consumed in the US originate (most with a Bacardi label on the bottle). Gran Anejo, which is produced by the Serrallés family, is an aged blend of rums that is definitely worth trying on its own or on the rocks.

Egg White Foam

For the drink’s foamy top you will need an egg white and a technique called dry shaking, in which the ingredients are first mixed without ice before they are shaken with ice. If you don’t do this, the egg white will curdle into an unappetizing glob.

If you’re unfamiliar with using egg in cocktails, don’t be intimidated. Egg whites have long been used in classic cocktails like the Whiskey Sour, Pisco Sour, and Ramos Gin Fizz. The egg whites add a delicious creaminess and foaminess to the drink.

Use the freshest egg white you can find. Though it’s likely how you first learned to do it, it’s best not to use the egg shell as a tool for separating the yolk from the whites. A safer option is to crack the egg into a slotted spoon, allowing the egg white to drip off, or crack the egg into a bowl and fish the yolk out with a teaspoon.

Finally, it’s essential that you roughly shake the cocktail, as directed below, for the full 30 seconds so that the egg is fully incorporated into the drink.

Bear in mind that there are safety considerations with using raw eggs, and the alcohol in your cocktail won’t ward off those risks. The outstanding web site Serious Eats has all the details. Bottom line, if you’re concerned about consuming or serving raw eggs, skip this part of the recipe.