Punch (10 page)

More or less. There would always be some who eyed Punch with suspicion. In 1727, Daniel Defoe could still sniff about “The Punch Drinkers of Quality (if any such there be).” But he was an old-timer, born just before the Restoration, and didn’t quite get what was going on. People of “Quality” most assuredly drank Punch; they just didn’t really respect it. Not even in the colonies: in 1739, Charles Francis wrote a friend in England from Jamaica that “The common Drink here is Madeira wine, or Rum Punch; the first, mixed with Water, is used by the better Sort; the latter, by Servants and the inferior kind of People.” Now, it’s safe to say that either he wasn’t being strictly truthful or his Jamaican acquaintances were on their best behavior while the man from the home office was sniffing around. Jamaica was as punchy as a place could be. But it’s true that even in its heyday, Punch could never quite rid itself of the whiff of the lower decks it carried with it. A gentleman or a lady could always drink French claret—even the brandy-jolted, adulterated stuff that passed under the name
^ad
—without giving even the severest critic grounds to so much as raise an eyebrow. But Punch, even at its most carefully compounded and wholesome, remained something of a spree drink, fuel for a devil-take-the-hindmost journey to the end of the night.

In the colonies, that didn’t matter so much, since by definition no colonial was truly of the best sort. As a result, Punch, and particularly Rum Punch, was consumed by almost every rung on the social ladder. When a group of African slaves plotted with a white alehouse-keeper to burn New York and slaughter its inhabitants—the abortive uprising that would be known as the New York Conspiracy of 1741—it was over Rum Punch that they conspired. Three years later, when Dr. Alexander Hamilton of Maryland took a trip to Maine and back for his health, he found his fellow colonials sluicing themselves with the stuff pretty liberally, in just about every town he visited. And if from time to time he joined them in a bowl, what of it? It was simply the sociable thing to do, as George Washington had to learn the hard way. In 1757, when the twenty-five-year-old major stood for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses, he was known as an unsociable fellow who had frequently wrangled with the local “Tippling-house keepers” over their selling drinks to his soldiers. To prove his uncongeniality, he stood on principle and declined to provide the customary free drinks at his campaign rallies. He lost. The next year, he spent thirty-six pounds and change on liquors, almost half of it on Punch. He won.

After independence for a time, free men continued to club together to while away their idle hours around a bowl of Punch, just as they had when they were subjects of the king. In November 1783, when the Continental Army reoccupied New York, there was a general carouse of several days’ duration. As part of it, George Clinton, the governor of New York State, held a banquet for the French ambassador at which the 120 guests emptied 30 bowls of (presumably Rum) Punch—and 135 bottles of Madeira, 36 bottles of port and 60 bottles of English beer. Or then there’s the celebration held for the ordination of a New England minister in 1785, at which the eighty people present put paid to “30 Boles of Punch before the People went to meeting” and “44 boles of Punch while at dinner,” not to mention 28 bottles of wine, 8 bowls of brandy and an unspecified quantity of “cherry rum.” As the new republic found its legs, though, the old institution began to seem a little quaint.

By then, though, Punch was beginning to fade even in the land that first fostered it. We can see the beginning of the end in India in a letter the
India Gazette
published in 1781 from “An Old Country Captain.” “I am an old stager in this Country,” he writes,

Note the nostalgic mode (and that wonderful word “gouglet”). The very fact that he had to write in to mention all this indicates that business was no longer conducted on these lines. By 1810, Thomas Williamson could write about Punch, in his
East India Guide and Vade-Mecum
, that “that beverage is now completely obsolete, unless among sea-faring persons, who rarely fail to experience its deleterious effects.” How low the mighty have fallen! Things were no better in America, long a bastion of Punch-drinking. By 1810, Americans were no longer colonists, and they were rapidly pursuing their own mixological path, without so much as a glance over their shoulder at their traditional drinkways.

Even in England, life was changing. The ritual of the Punch bowl had been a secular communion, welding a group of good fellows together into a temporary sodality whose values superseded all others—or, in plain English, a group of men gathered around a bowl of Punch could be pretty much counted on to see it to the end, come what may. All in good fun, and something the modern world could perhaps use a little more of, but it required its participants to have a large block of uncommitted time on their hands. As the nineteenth century wore on, this was less and less likely to be the case. Industrialization and improved communications and the rise of the bourgeoisie all made claims on the individual that militated against partaking of the Lethean bowl. Not that the Victorians were exactly sober, by our standards, but neither could they be as wet as their forefathers. As Robert Chambers put it in 1864, “Advanced ideas on the question of temperance have, doubtless, . . . had their influence in rendering obsolete, in a great measure, this beverage.”

This isn’t the only reason Punch fell by the wayside, of course. Improvements in distilling and, above all, aging of liquors meant that they required less intervention to make them palatable. The rise of a global economy made for greater choice of potables and a more fragmented culture of drink. Central heating to some degree dimmed the charms of hot Punch. Ideas of democracy and individualism extended to men’s behavior in the barroom, where they were less likely to all settle for the same thing or let someone else choose what they were to drink. Like all social institutions, the bowl of Punch was subject to a plethora of subtle and incremental strains. Eventually, by midcentury, they toppled it, with most of the pull coming from America. Punch was out and the Cocktail, the down-the-hatch, out-the-door-and-back-to-work drink par excellence, was in. The flowing bowl would serve out the rest of its days in the twilight land of the special-occasion, holiday-gathering drink.

A CONCISE BUT COMPREHENSIVE COURSE IN THE ART OF MAKING PUNCH

Unless you’re a total mixology geek, I strongly suggest you skip this entire section of the book and proceed to Book III, “The Punches.” If you actually start making any of those, you can always come back here for tips, pointers and reasons why. Until then, off you go.

THE REASON WHY

There’s something about Punch that demands generalities and grand schemes. I suppose it has to do with the not-inconsiderable investment each bowl requires in time and, some would argue more importantly, money. By contrast, a Cocktail can be lashed together from whatever’s at hand. Tequila, kumquat juice and clover honey? Give it a spin. Tawny port, Cherry Heering, Holland gin and half-and-half? Why the hell not? If it proves unsatisfactory (as I suspect that last one might), down the drain it goes and no regrets. You’re only out a couple of ounces of booze and the thirty seconds or so it takes to shake them up. But when it’s a question of twenty minutes of squeezing lemons, a quart and a half—eighty dollars’ worth, give or take, at New York prices—of pretty good cognac, and the hopes and dreams of the thirty people who shall soon be ringing your door-bell, that’s an entirely different story. Punch matters. Punch has heft. As one nineteenth-century master put it, “a man can never make good punch unless he is satisfied, nay positive, that no man breathing can make better.” That satisfaction comes from experience, to be sure. But it also comes from knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing; from, in short, a theory.

The theorizing began early—in fact, with the rather eccentric hat-merchant-cum-vegetarian-activist-cum-temperance-crusader Thomas Tryon, who noted back in 1684 that Punch was made from “four or five ingredients, all of as different Natures as Light is from Darkness, and all great Extreams in their kind, except only the
Water
” and that in the mixture the fiery spirits and corrosively acidic limes “are some-what allay’d or moderated by the friendly Ingredients, viz.
Water
and
Sugar
, which do not only render it pleasurable to the Pallate, but also more tollerable to the Stomach”—although not to the point that the “Extreams” are made “altogether
Homogeneal
,” or completely annul each other (indeed, Tryon denied that this was even possible). This, the earliest statement of the fundamental principle of making Punch, differs only in lexical and grammatical detail from the assertion Jerry Thomas made in his pioneering
Bar-Tenders Guide
, published in 1862 at the very end of the Punch era, that a large part of the “grand secret” to making Punch is making it “sweet and strong” while “thoroughly amalgamating all the compounds, so that the taste of neither the bitter, the sweet, the spirit, nor the element [i.e., H
₂
O], shall be perceptible one over the other.”
^ae

Indeed, this idea of Punch as the embodiment of balance was so common during its heyday that it became proverbial. One example among many: if it were permissible to compare great things to vulgar ones, Bernard Mandeville disingenuously informs us in
The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits
, his 1714 philosophical
success de scandale
, “I would compare the Body Politick (I confess the Simile is very low) to a Bowl of Punch.” Avarice is the sour, spendthrift prodigality the sweet, the water is like “the Ignorance, Folly and Credulity of the floating insipid Multitude” and the “sublime Qualities of Men . . . separated by Art from the Dregs of Nature” are “an equivalent to Brandy.” Individually, the ingredients are not promising. “I don’t doubt but a
Westphalian
,
Laplander
, or any other dull Stranger that is unacquainted with the wholesome Composition,” Mandeville adds,

Mix them all “judiciously,” though, and you have “an excellent Liquor, lik’d of and admir’d by Men of exquisite Palates.” (It should be noted that Mandeville, not a foolish man, was describing here an ideal body politic, not the British body politic of 1714, which I would liken more to a bowl of Olde English 800 spiked with Hennessy Paradis.)

Unfortunately, this idea of Punch as the balance of opposites, while useful enough as far as it goes, appears to be pretty much the only bit of abstract or higher analysis Punch-makers or Punch-drinkers ever advanced on its behalf, and it’s really not enough. Balance, you see—well, a properly constructed Dry Martini is balanced, but so is a properly constructed Piña Colada, and those are about as different as two drinks can be. Balance covers relationships but not intensities, relative ranges but not absolute values. Nor does the higher-union-of-opposites idea really explain the role of the spice, something Mandeville tacitly acknowledged by simply omitting it from his simile.

To really get inside the Punch bowl, we’ve got to consider what the original Punch-makers were trying to achieve. That means projecting ourselves into their world, at least a little bit. First of all, for most of the Punch Age, there was no such thing as a Cocktail. The ship’s officers, India factors, Maryland planters, coffeehouse wits and other men and women who clustered around the flowing bowl at taverns, country houses, picnics and wherever else it radiated its woozy glow were wine-drinkers, beer-drinkers, sometimes even dram-drinkers. What they weren’t were drinkers of pungent, concentrated, icy blasts of spirits and spice, or spirits, citrus and spice—dramstrength stimulants meant to be consumed quickly but sparingly. In fact, Britons were conversant with the basic formula for what would become the Cocktail—spirits, bitters, sugar, perhaps a little water—a full hundred years before it caught on in America, and they did little with it but make occasional use of it as a hangover cure.