Punch (11 page)

That tells us we have to approach Punch differently—well, okay, we don’t absolutely
have
to; there’s nothing in the world to stop anyone from making a bowl-sized Cocktail and certainly nothing to stop anyone else from drinking it. But to get the most out of Punch, to enjoy it as something not only different in scale from the now-ubiquitous Cocktail but also different in kind, then yes. Differently. We have to, for a brief moment, dethrone the Cocktail, expel it from our thinking. In a drinking culture that could have embraced it but chose not to, its quick impact, concentration and intensity of flavor—for us its greatest attributes—were instead drawbacks. For someone who decries the “empyreumatick or burnt taste . . . easily distinguished by every palate in fresh distilled rum, brandy, simple and compound waters,” as a writer in the
London Magazine
did in 1768, a forward presence of spirits would hardly be a recommendation.

For the first generations of Punch-drinkers, it was (as we have seen) a means of making the dram of spirits, a “Vesuvian” drink fit only for the “Bawd” and the “Country Bitch,” for “swearing Porters . . . drunken Carr-men / And the lewd drivers of the Hackney Coaches” (as a 1683 satire on brandy-drinking represented its public), into something that one could drink without losing social status—something fit for, as the satire put it, “Sots of Quality.” To accomplish that, it had to assimilate spirits as closely as possible to the dominant tipple of the upper class. Here, then, is the secret of Punch’s success: true Punch is wine by other means. Using the gentlemanly qualities of judgment and taste, the Punch-mixer takes simple, even base materials (the spice excepted) and forges them into an artificial wine, in the process restoring some of the nobility that the industrial process of distillation has brutally stripped away.

So. An “extemporary kind of wine” (as a British medical writer defined it in 1779). What does that mean in practice? In part, nothing new: anyone who has learned to make a proper Sidecar, Margarita or Aviation Cocktail will already have mastered the art of balancing sweet and sour so that the drink is neither tooth-settingly tart nor in any way syrupy. For Punch, you’ll have to do that. But you’ll also have to learn to balance the spirituous and aqueous elements, so that the drink is soft and pleasant but not insipid; so that the taste and aroma of the base liquor are present enough to remind you that you’re drinking spirits, but with none of its heat or bite. James Ashley, London’s leading purveyor of Punch in the eighteenth century (and a man whom we shall meet again in Book III), found that balance point at one part spirits to two parts water, citrus and sugar. Assuming said spirits were roughly half alcohol, that yields a Punch that’s about 16 percent alcohol (by volume)—the strength of a (very) strong California Cab or a light sherry.

But Punch has to be balanced in three dimensions, not two—after sweetness and strength have been reconciled with their opposites, there remains the question of pungency. In the nineteenth century, it was a common gambler’s trick to bet someone that he couldn’t eat a quail a day for thirty days. Just one tiny, tasty little quail every day? Easy money. And yet so few were able to complete the challenge that when they did it went into the pages of the sporting almanacs. For the first week, the task is a pleasure. For the second, entirely tolerable. But then the gaminess of the little birds starts to pall, then creates an aversion, and then quickly becomes nauseating. It’s the same with Punch: a bowl made “interesting” with too much spice—be that the traditional sort (nutmeg, allspice, mace and the like), an unusual sort of herbal tea, copious dashes of bitters, Chartreuse and its ilk or even something as seemingly innocuous as tropical fruit—can be unusually compelling for the first glass or three, but by the time the bowl is half empty, it will cloy. Above all things, Punch must be moreish.
^af
It’s a long-distance drink, not a sprinter like the Cocktail. If you’ve made five gallons of the stuff, you want to make sure that five gallons is what people will drink, not two.

But that’s more than enough theory for a book that’s supposed to be about mixing drinks. Before we lift up the hood and get our hands all greasy, though, we’d better make sure we’ve got our tools laid out. Three-quarters of the work in making Punch is logistical: assembling your ingredients, choosing your tools, preparing your ice (should you choose to use it). We’ll take these more or less in order.

INGREDIENTS

You can make Punch out of most anything, really. It doesn’t have to be the traditional arracks, brandies, rums, whiskeys and gins. Mountain men in the old Southwest frequently made theirs with mescal, about which one later recalled, “It made punches nearly equal to Scotch whisky, and solaced many a winter’s evening.” Or consider the Tequila Punch, “pink and of flavor indescribable,” that Stanton Davis Kirkham came across a-hundred-odd years ago in a town near Veracruz. Or, for that matter, the concoction encountered in 1873 by J. A. MacGahan, correspondent of the
New York Herald
, in a Russian army camp outside the walls of the ancient Uzbek city of Khiva: “Dinner concluded,” he wrote,

I shouldn’t wonder.

As curious as such concoctions may be, though, I’ll confine my general observations on ingredients to those most used during Punch’s heyday, leaving oddballs and misfits to the commentary on individual Punches in Book III.

Punch was born before the column still. This last device, introduced in the early nineteenth century, enabled distillers to make spirits of remarkable purity and cleanliness—think vodka (at least as we know it now), Bacardi, London dry gin; the white spirits. One thing that most of these products share is a featherweight body or texture on the tongue. Excellent in a Martini or a Daiquiri; in a bowl of Punch from the golden age, not so much. For that, you’ll want the richer textures and bigger flavors characteristic of the products of the pot still. In some cases, as detailed below, that will be a problem.

Equally problematic is the question of proof. Until the 1720s, there was no even approximately effective way of measuring the alcohol content of a distilled spirit, or of anything else for that matter. Before that, distillers, merchants and the men who taxed them relied on rule-of-thumb tests involving the size of bubbles a bottle of the distillate in question produces when it’s shaken,
^ag
or whether or not a portion of gunpowder wet with it will catch fire. In 1725, though, one John Clarke came up with a hydrometer, which accurately measured how much alcohol was in a given spirit; its use would be made official in 1787 (in 1818, it was replaced by Bartholomew Sikes’s improved version, which remained in official service until 1907 and unofficial service up to the 1980s). This simple device enabled the government to set a standard “proof,” against which all spirits would be measured. That proof was 50 percent alcohol. But due to the way the hydrometer worked, that 50 percent was by weight, not by volume, which is how we measure it today. Alcohol being significantly lighter than water, that meant that a spirit that was 100 percent of proof (i.e., 50 percent alcohol by weight) contained between 57 and 58 percent alcohol by volume, making it 114 to 116 proof by our system. Simple, right?

I bring all this up because it has very real consequences when adapting certain old recipes. Not the seventeenth- or early-eighteenth-century ones, perhaps. For them, the proper proof of the spirits used will have to be a guess, as they could have been anywhere between 45 and 60 percent alcohol by volume, which means you’ll have to balance your Punch the old-fashioned way, by tasting. But for a late-eighteenth- or nineteenth-century recipe, if all you have is an 80-proof (40 percent by volume) spirit and you’re in the grip of an obsession with accuracy, you’ll have to make adjustments, multiplying the amount of spirit you put in by 1.4 and subtracting as much water from the amount the recipe calls for as you’ve added of extra booze. Say, for example, you’re making a British Milk Punch recipe from 1832 that calls for “1 quart French brandy” and all you have is an 80-proof cognac. Bearing in mind that the imperial quart of 40 ounces is what’s called for here (see “A Note on Measurements,” on page 98), you’ll have to use 56 ounces of cognac and subtract 16 ounces from the amount of water added.

However. Even back in the day, not every spirit was sold at proof. (To contemplate the ways that old vintners’ and publicans’ handbooks suggest to fool the hydrometer is to despair for poor, mendacious mankind.) And, Punch being a compound beverage, the amount of water with which that spirit will be diluted in the final mixture is entirely in the hands of the person compounding it. Therefore, with few exceptions, I have not built this proof adjustment into my suggested recipes. Anyone making Punch properly will withhold some of the water anyway, adding it slowly to taste. If your Punch is on the verge of lacking, well, punch, just stop adding the water. But on to the individual spirits. Since this is not a handbook on liquor or its history, I’ll keep my notes brief.

“Arrack,” as we saw in Book I, is a generic term like “liquor,” and its kinds are legion. Only two of them, however, are important for Punch-making—or three, if you find “must avoid” status to be important. That third one is the Middle Eastern type, which is flavored with anise and, generally, sweetened. Wonderful with water and ice but horrible in Punch. Unfortunately, it’s also the easiest to find in the United States.

Until recently, the other two types, Batavia arrack and palm arrack, were entirely unavailable in the United States and had been since Prohibition, if not before. When, eight years ago, I first contracted my obsession with Punch, I had to have my Batavia arrack air-freighted from Germany, a case at a time, that being the minimum economical order. The day the big box came was always a red-letter one, marked with much sounding of the festive trump and slaughter of the fatted lime. Now, thanks to Eric Seed of specialty liquor importer Haus Alpenz, it is again available, if less than universally. Batavia Arrack van Oosten is the brand to seek out.

It’s worth tracking down. Batavia arrack has a raw, flat tang that has a way of floating itself over the surface of the drink and right into that tiny, atavistic part of your brain that controls motor function and inhibition. It’s got the funk. That should come as no surprise, though, considering how it’s made. In 1820, John Crawfurd, “late British Resident at the court of the Sultan of Java,” detailed the process. Rice was boiled and molded into cakes. These cakes were put in baskets over a vat, and as they fermented, a liquid dripped into the vat. That was collected, mixed with almost double its volume of molasses (diluted, we must assume) and a splash—less than a tenth of its volume—of palm wine, presumably to aid fermentation. The resulting liquid was then left to ferment for weeks, not the usual days (a long fermentation makes for a robustly flavored spirit), and was then distilled in Chinese-style pot stills. As far as I can determine, the manufacture hasn’t changed all that much. These days, when the spirit comes off the still, the stuff bound for export is matured for a couple of months in large teak vats and then shipped off to Holland, where the almost three-hundred-year-old firm of E. A. Scheer stores it, blends it and wholesales it.

As for palm arrack, otherwise known as palm wine, coconut-palm or Goa arrack, this class of spirits, widely popular in South and Southeast Asia, is made not from the nut but from the watery sap of the tree itself, collected by slicing the flower bud and putting a pot under it. The resulting liquid quickly ferments into “toddy,” or palm wine. The traditional method of distillation was in clay pot stills with bamboo tubing (shades of ancient Taxila), the resulting spirits coming in three grades, depending on strength. “Feni” or “fenny” was the strongest, plain old arrack the intermediate and “sura” the weakest—although according to the Portuguese it went “fenim,” “fechado” and “urraca.” At any rate, judging by the frequent British complaints about the strength of Goa arrack, they weren’t getting the fenny.

True Goa arrack is still made, but it hasn’t been seen on the world market in quite some time, and indeed the center of the modern industry has moved to Sri Lanka. Fortunately, the Sri Lankan firm of Mendis exports its palm arracks fairly broadly, and they can be found in North America if you look hard enough. They come in several grades, depending on how much time they’ve spent in the indigenous halmilla-wood vats and casks in which they’re aged. For Punch use, there’s no need to go beyond the VSOA (“Very Special Old Arrack”) grade. This sourish, lightly funky spirit is definitely worth tracking down, as it makes a Punch that’s uniquely delicate and integrated in flavor.

Also worth keeping an eye out for in your travels is lambanog, the Philippine version of palm arrack. At its best, it’s delicate, lightly floral and utterly bewitching. At its worst, it’s bubble-gum-flavored. Really. Oh, and blue. The new Asia, God love it.

The eighteenth-century British Punch-drinker insisted on French brandy when he wanted Brandy Punch, and preferably genuine cognac at that.
^ah
Sometimes he got it. Other times he got rectified molasses- or malt-spirit, colored with God knows what and flavored with extracts and essences—and often dangerous ones at that. When he could get the real stuff, it was at “strong bubble-proof,” as the physician and pioneering popularizer of chemistry Peter Shaw wrote in 1731, a point upon which the French stood “to a
Punctilio.
” That, to Shaw, was unusual. Also worth noting was how “Old French Brandy, by having long lain in an oaken Cask . . . becomes a dilute
Tincture of Oak.
” And how long was long? “Sometimes twelve or eighteen months, and often two or three years.” For Shaw, that (to us) brief period in wood “wonderfully takes off . . . that hot, acrid, and foul taste, peculiar to all Spirits or Brandies newly distill’d; and gives them a coolness and a softness not easily to be introduced by art.”