Punch (12 page)

For eighteenth-century Punch-making, in other words, a plain old VS cognac works just fine. I’m particularly fond of the Martell, although a VS from just about any of the major houses will work. Avoid anything suspiciously cheap (i.e., under twenty dollars a bottle). There are even one or two cognacs imported at cask strength, if you can find them. Otherwise, you’re going to have to work with the standard 40-percent-alcohol-by-volume stuff.

I have also had tolerable results with Raynal brandy, which is French but isn’t cognac and is quite cheap, and even with Paul Masson Grand Amber, which is California brandy mixed with a little cognac, and even cheaper. When using either of those, I generally make sure to supplement them with rum.

By the nineteenth century, older cognacs were available and still cheap enough to mix into Punch. There was, however, a good deal of “sophistication” in the trade, by which I mean counterfeiting, forging and adulterating. If you were lucky, all that would mean was that your cognac had been darkened or, at worst, sweetened with a little caramel. If you weren’t—well, how does German potato-spirit flavored with “oil of cognac” strike you? No, I didn’t think so. In any case, for the elegant clubman’s Punch of the Regency period, you might want to spring for a VSOP, if possible. Your friends will thank you, if not your financial planner. As for brands, I’ve made many a succulent bowl of Punch with the Hennessy Privilege VSOP, and many another with the Pierre Ferrand Ambre.

The flavored vodka we know as London dry gin didn’t achieve widespread popularity until some fifty-odd years after the Punch Age ended, and it couldn’t have been made at all until the introduction of the column still in the 1830s. By then, Punch was already in line for the hearty handshake and the gold watch. For Gin Punch, in other words, you’ll want something a good deal older in its conception. If it’s an eighteenth-century style, you’ll need Holland gin—genever, as its makers call it. Pot-stilled, thick and malty, it’s one of the world’s great distillates, as even the British realized: they greatly preferred imported “Hollands” to the home product, at least until the blockades of the Napoleonic wars forced them to improve the quality of the latter. (Be sure to use the kind known as “corenwijn” or at least oude genever; the clear, light-bodied jonge genever that leads the Dutch market is a twentieth-century style; the Bols Genever marketed in America looks like a jonge but is oude indeed and quite effective in Punch.)

If you’re making a British Gin Punch from Punch’s twilight years, though, you’ll need Old Tom gin, a transitional style with a heavier body and more forward botanicals than London dry—or so I understand it, anyway; for more on the vexed question of Old Tom, you’ll have to consult Gaz (fka Gary) Regan’s indispensable
Bartender’s Gin Compendium
. Recommended brands of Old Tom are Ransom (for which, I must disclose, I played an advisory role) and Hayman’s. By the time this book is in the stores, there will doubtless be more available.

Or you can just say the hell with it and use Tanqueray or Plymouth. Your Punch will still taste good, anyway—as long as it’s not a hot one. Hot Punch and London dry gin are not a combination I have found to be a happy one.

If by rum you mean something as white and pleasantly inoffensive as vodka, or as sweet, mellow and woody as bourbon, then you’re not talking Punch rum. Pot-stilled, high-proof Pirate Juice (see the following list), full of hogo, that’s what you want. What’s this “hogo,” you ask? The Victorian free-love advocate Grant Allen defined it perfectly in one of his novels, when he has a West Indian planter explain: “it’s our common West Indian corruption . . . of
haut goût
—
haut goût
, you understand me . . . or
hogo
, being the strong and somewhat offensive molasses-like flavour of new rum, before it has been mellowed . . . by being kept for years in the wood and in bottle.” “Hogo” was a term of art in the rum trade since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, when John Oldmixon used it in his history of the Americas. Derived from the term for the “high taste” of rotting meat, it could certainly be used pejoratively. But just as one cultivated the
haut goût
in pheasants and other game birds by hanging them for days before cooking them, so the hogo in rum came to be appreciated and even, to a degree, encouraged.

Rarely, though, by modern rum-makers. There are exceptions: Brazilian cachaça and the rhum agricoles of Martinique display its characteristic sulfurous “twang” in spades (as does, for that matter, Batavia arrack). But most rum-makers from Britain’s former Caribbean colonies have learned to suppress it. That’s a shame, since their rums grew up with Punch and were formerly precisely the kind Punch demands. Something that can heave itself up to its feet; shake off all those layers of citrus, spice, and the “element”; and say in a strong, firm voice, “Damn right, I am somebody!”
Rum.
These days, most of the rum exported by the islands of Jamaica and Barbados—two of the three main strongholds of British rum-making during the Punch Age—is sold in blends of carefully aged pot-still and column-still spirits, light in body, mellow and pleasant in flavor and absolutely nothing like the styles those islands were making fifty years ago, let alone in the eighteenth century.

In Jamaica itself, at least, the number-one-selling spirit is the hogo-rich Wray & Nephew White Overproof, which if not pure Pirate Juice (it’s too light-bodied for that) will nonetheless do until one comes along (I have made many a fine bowl of Rum Punch by marrying it to a hogoless but full-bodied rum such as Gosling’s). But fortunately for us, one has: Eric Seed, the man who brought us Batavia Arrack van Oosten, has also recently introduced Smith & Cross rum, a London dock-style Jamaican rum blended from aged Plummer and Wedderburn-style long-fermentation, high-ester, pure pot-still rums and bottled at 100 percent of proof (Sikes). More than that, one cannot ask. Equally good for Punch is the pure pot-still, 100 percent-proof Inner Circle Green Dot rum, from Australia. If you can’t get those and can get to the duty-free shop at Heathrow, Wood’s Old Navy Rum is a more than acceptable substitute (they sell it elsewhere in Britain, too). It’s at proof and hails from the one part of the British Caribbean that keeps the faith on hogo in everything it makes, the Demerara River region of Guyana. El Dorado rums, also from there, are quite good, although they tend to be bottled at 40 percent alcohol by volume and lack the London dock-aging (there’s something about sitting around in barrels in the soft English climate that really works for rum). Finally, Bundaberg in Australia makes a high-proof, hogo-rich rum that, while definitely on the crude side for sipping, makes a fair dinkum Punch.
^ai

By the nineteenth century, rums began to appear that moderated the hogo with a good deal of age and blending, but here we are on more familiar territory, so I won’t go into detail about them. Instead, let me give a brief recap or précis of the styles best adapted for Punch use, with brands. There are three, which I have named after my own fancy; the brands I have listed are by way of example and by no means intended to be an exclusive list:

PIRATE JUICE.
The full-hogo, high-proof stuff; formerly known as “Jamaica rum.” Recommended brands: Inner Circle Green Dot, Smith & Cross, Wood’s, Wray & Nephew White Overproof, Lemon Hart (mix equal parts 80-proof and 151-proof), Sea Wynde, Bundaberg.

PLANTER’S BEST.
Older, mellower, smoother, lower in proof. Recommended brands: Angostura 1919, El Dorado (five- or twelve-year), Chairman’s Reserve, J.M VSOP, Plantation Barbados five-year Grande Reserve, English Harbour five-year, Scarlet Ibis.

STIGGINS’S DELIGHT.
(Christened after Dickens’s rum-swilling reverend). Even older, richer, darker and more expensive. Recommended brands: Mount Gay Extra Old, Angostura 1824, El Dorado (fifteen- or twenty-one-year), most of the Plantation vintage rums.

The only Irish whiskeys on the market today made the way Irish whiskey was during the Punch Age are the single-malt ones, and even those, although plenty tasty, are almost always too old and too low-proof to be the real McCoy, historically speaking. (If you can get the Connemara cask-strength, that’s young and strong, if too peaty to represent the mainstream of Irish whiskey-making during our period.) But malts are a minority style now, and they were then—at least, ones made out of pure barley. The mainstream Irish whiskeys of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were made from mixed grains, with healthy proportions of oats (perhaps 15 to 20 percent of the total grain) and rye (20 to 30 percent). Up until 1785, when a new malt tax was imposed, all the grain was malted. After that, only a little malted barley was used, but the same grains were used in unmalted form. The resulting rich, oily, pot-stilled whiskey remained the dominant style until the 1950s. Today, the oats and rye have gone for good from the pot-still whiskeys, only one of which even uses the malted-unmalted barley mix. That one is Redbreast, and it’s delicious in Punch hot or cold.

For cold Irish Whiskey Punch, if your budget can’t stretch to Redbreast or malt whiskey (the utterly sublime Bushmills ten-year-old comes at cognac prices), then John Powers is your man.

Scotch malt whiskey, on the other hand, is essentially what it was back in the day, only older (whiskey was rarely aged much, if at all) and far more expensive. A young, peaty, cask-strength single malt is what you want. Fortunately, in Scotland ten years can be considered young, and there are several fine malts that fit the bill. Laphroaig cask-strength is widely distributed and works just fine. Any cheap malt whiskey, even if challenging to sip, will make a tolerable Punch.

Finally, American whiskey. Young, strong, rye. Solution: Old Potrero. Done. (Or you can just use pretty much any bonded bourbon or rye.)

Punch isn’t just booze, of course. Some brief notes on the sweet, sour, spicy and aqueous ingredients are thus in order, with the caveat that the unusual will be discussed, should it arise, in Book III.

The scurvy-killing “lymmons” of the early East India Company ships were almost certainly limes. Not until late in the seventeenth century, once Punch had taken hold and people had to really focus on their citrus, was a consistent distinction drawn. And a distinction it was: limes were, as Dr. John Covel put it in the 1670s, “a sort of hedge or crab Lemmons.” That “hedge” was telling, as it was usually compounded with words such as “whore,” “alehouse” or “writer” and had connotations not unlike our “Walmart.” Some cloaked their distaste for the foreign lime in science: Tryon, for example, dubbed it “an immature Fruit, wherein the
Martial
and
Saturnine
Poysons are so powerful that the Sun and Elements have not had power to awake the
Balsamic Vertues.
” (Lemons are actually on average more acidic—and hence full of “Martial and Saturnine Poysons”—than limes.)

In any case, whether they were perceived as too acidic, too foreign or too colonial (Britain’s Caribbean possessions were awash with lime juice), until well into the nineteenth century limes were viewed with considerable suspicion by those drinking Punch in England, who preferred the “nobler” lemon or orange. Both sweet and sour versions of the latter were available, with an edge to the sour ones (particularly in the earlier years), and it is rarely specified which kind was being used. However, the sweet kind, used alone, make for an insipid, watery Punch.

If you can find Seville or sour oranges, by all means pounce on them. Their juice, what there is of it, is nothing special—indeed, it tastes almost exactly like lemon juice, which can thus be used to supplement it. Their peel, however, makes for a memorable “oleo-saccharum,” or “sugar-oil,” which you will find discussed below. When preparing that compound from lemons, as is more common, the large, knobby, thick-skinned varieties tend to yield more oil than the small, thin-skinned ones, although those are easier to juice. In either case, pick the ones with the brightest, glossiest skins.

Whichever sort of citrus you use, it should be brought to room temperature and rolled hard on a firm surface before squeezing; you’ll get a lot more juice that way.

Citrus fruit was not the only souring agent used in the flowing bowl. In calling for “a little Vinegar or Verjuice or Limon Juice or Lime Juice, which of them you can get,” a 1695 recipe identified the true impetus for experimentation: supply. When lemons and such were scarce, people improvised. That improvising began early, if we are to judge by the records of the provincial secretary of New York, which include an entry from 1678 for money lent to one John Shakerley for “3 pints rum, 2 lb sugar and a qtt [quart] vineger . . . to make punch with Mr. Oldfeild [
sic
].” Aaron Burr, at least, liked his Vinegar Punch hot, or at least so tolerated it (it turns up thus in the journal he kept when he was in Paris in 1811), but I’m not convinced. Other, I suspect better, “sowerings” that one comes across include that 1695 verjuice, more pleasing than vinegar but not as sour, as well as tamarinds (a pretty fair substitute) and gooseberry juice, which I have not tried.