Punch (13 page)

I have no intention of giving a mini-encyclopedia of spices. Those that turn up in one Punch recipe or another are varied and legion, although few are as delightful as the one that rules them all, nutmeg. I will treat of the others in Book III, in the individual recipes they appear in, and confine my remarks on nutmeg to the observation that anyone who would spice his or her Punch with ground nutmeg out of a jar would make fettucine Alfredo with the “parmesan” that comes in a can. (I know that because I have, to my present chagrin, done both.) Whole nutmegs used to be of such value that wars were fought over them. Now they are cheap. There’s no excuse.

The other spice that must be discussed is tea. Among the general instructions with which Jerry Thomas begins the section of his book devoted to Punch is the command to “us[e] tea instead of water.” Hot or cold, this addition, attested to as early as 1727, makes for a much more complex Punch. There are a couple of caveats attached, however. Tea is quite astringent, and a Tea Punch will require more sugar than one without it, particularly if you’re using black tea (green tea has less bite and is therefore favored by many of the authorities; it certainly preceded black tea in Punch use by several decades). Tea also has caffeine, which means that a bowl of Tea Punch can make for some very energetic drunks who will have a hard time sleeping it off. One of the worst nights I’ve ever had came after an afternoon of, admittedly, overindulging in an Arrack Punch made with gunpowder tea. I still shudder to recall the racing pulse, the ravaging thirst, the damp, twisted sheets. Vodka and Red Bull is Similac in comparison. These days, I only include it when the Punch will be served in the afternoon and in strictly finite quantities. In my experience, herbal teas are too highly flavored to make an acceptable substitute, as they tend to hijack the Punch and cloy.

Sugar that is both cheap and dazzlingly white is a thing of the modern world. True, Mandeville could speak, in the early eighteenth century, of the “glistning brightness of the finest Loaf Sugar,” but that represented the flower, so to speak, of the sugar crop, and it was not for the masses. Most people had to do with a dingier, less refined product. But they would have had the last laugh, as an unrefined sugar such as demerara adds not only sweetness to Punch but also flavor, and is in fact preferable from an epicurean standpoint.

Unfortunately for the Punch reenactor, though, our sugar no longer comes in the dense loaves it used to. That does make it easier to measure out and dissolve, but it means you can’t use it to rub off the oil-bearing peel of the lemon, as was the common practice. The kinds of sugar that do come in loaves—the Latin American piloncillo, or panela, and jaggery, or palm sugar, from India and Southeast Asia (highly recommended in Arrack Punch), are too soft for the task, while zuckerhut, the pointy little loaf used in Germany for making Feuerzangenbowle, is admirably white and sharp grained, but too crumbly.

If you are using piloncillo, it will have to be turned into a syrup first. Simply put the loaf in a pan with an equal quantity of water and work it over low heat, breaking it up into smaller and smaller pieces as it softens. Remember to take the water into account when you’re figuring out the final dilution of your Punch. In general, equal volumes of sugar and water or citrus juice mixed will create a syrup whose volume is a little more than one and a half times that of either ingredient, a cup each of sugar and water thus making about thirteen ounces of syrup.

Jaggery, also known as gur or, in Indonesia, gula jawa (this is usually mixed with cane sugar), is softer than cane sugar and can sometimes be dissolved in citrus juice or cold water if it is broken up first. In any case, it yields an oddly fruity, cloudy syrup that does wonders for the exoticism of your Punch.

As for granulated sugars, for everyday Punch use, I generally prefer a raw sugar such as a demerara, a turbinado or an evaporated cane juice. There are a plethora of brands of both of these styles on the market; you can find them at stores that make any pretense at carrying natural foods. That includes Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. The finer the grain, the easier it is to dissolve. That holds true with white sugars as well. Those I will use only in the lightest Gin Punches or when speed of assembly is of the essence, in which case superfine sugar will be found most useful.

Finally, the “element,” as it was known. H
₂
O. Variations and sophistications such as the use of Champagne or soda water will be discussed in the appropriate places in Book III. Ice, however, needs a little attention. Punch, lacking the alcoholic concentration of the Cocktail, does not need to be as numbingly cold—indeed, it is best if it isn’t: if it’s chilled to Cocktail temperatures (i.e., below 32 degrees Fahrenheit), its fragrance is muted and its delicate harmony lost. It does, nonetheless, like to be cool, and in the summer, very cool. Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, iced Punch was considered a luxury indeed. Back then, the ice that provided the cooling had to be cut in the winter from frozen ponds and streams in large blocks and stored in insulated icehouses. That meant that Punch-makers could cut their ice to fit the bowl. The larger the block, the slower it would melt and dilute the Punch. Many preferred to avoid the dilution issue entirely by premixing the Punch, bottling it and keeping the bottles on ice, serving the Punch in small, frequently refilled bowls. Others refrigerated the bowl, either by sinking it in a very large block of ice or by putting it in a much bigger bowl and filling the space in between with cracked ice and salt. In either case, the bowl that held the Punch had to be of silver or some other, baser metal. The final option was to make the Punch extra strong and pour it over a bowl full of cracked ice. That was the American way of the nineteenth century, but then again we had already learned to tolerate ice in our drinks.

When I’m making Punch, if it’s going to be ladled out over the course of an afternoon or evening, I’ll use a large block of ice. This method has the advantage of ensuring that the Punch is weaker as the session progresses—not a bad thing. If it’s all going to be ladled out at once, I’ll go American and fill the bowl with ice cubes. It’ll cool much faster and the punch will be gone before too much of the ice has melted.

To make a block of ice, you’ll need a container half the capacity of your Punch bowl. Fill it with water and freeze it (for the larger quantities, this might take as long as forty-eight hours). Some people obsess about getting the block of ice to look just right, even going so far as to fill it with flowers, slices of fruit, and so on. I do not.

TOOLS

In my last book,
Imbibe!
, the section on tools took up a good twelve pages. American-style Cocktail-making being a craft that its first appreciators thought was best left to professionals, it required a professional tool kit. Punch-making, though, while often practiced by professionals, was an essentially amateur art, and its traditional tools are accordingly few and simple.
Notes & Queries
covered most of them in 1885:

This last usually took the form of a slender and graceful turned ebony or whalebone handle attached to the side of a smallish oval bowl, always of silver and usually with a silver shilling set into the bottom. Add a knife and a little silver nutmeg box, with a grater for a lid, and you were done, although there were those who would have thrown in a mechanical juicer rather than squeeze the fruit by hand. Napoleon’s empress Josephine (a native of Martinique, deep in the Punch-belt) had a monogrammed one in silver. Nice.

I suppose the bowl could use a little elucidation, and we might as well take a quick look at the glasses while we’re at it. England had a long tradition of mixing ale or wine with this and that and passing it around in bowls, so the line between a Posset bowl and a Punch bowl is rather a hazy one. But we know that “punchbowl” is first attested to in 1658 and that the drink was reputable enough by 1680 for those bowls to start appearing in silver.
^aj
Less exalted topers drank from earthenware and even wood. The large silver Punch bowl became a prime piece of institutional hardware, and every regiment, city corporation, guild, club and whatever else that very associative age could offer in the way of social organization had one: a capacious, footed silver hemisphere, with elaborate, cast handles on the sides and as much engraving as it could hold. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain’s growing East Asia trade also supplied the booming market in Punch bowls with all the genuine china it could use. There were domestic versions, as well, often painted with political, patriotic or satirical themes (amusingly enough, Hogarth’s squalid
Midnight Modern Conversation
, the print that you will find on the cover of this volume, was a popular motif).

Punch bowls came in all sizes, from the covered “sneaker” or “tiff ” that held no more than a cup to the mammoth five-gallon Alderman’s special. The default size, however, seems to have held a quart, with double and “thribble” bowls holding the requisite amounts (one must bear in mind that Punch was rarely served with ice in it, so a quart bowl of it, even if it was only one-third liquor, would still have room for a good twelve ounces of high-proof rum (the equivalent of more than a pint of 80-proof stuff). More than enough to get two people quite squiffy.

In the early nineteenth century, serious Punch-makers began turning to large earthenware jugs for day-to-day use. They didn’t look like much, but they held enough for a small gathering, were easy to pour from, and did a better job of keeping hot punch hot and iced punch cold.

As for glasses, since the smaller bowls of Punch were generally passed around to be sipped from, they were not always necessary. Once the bowl reached a certain size, of course, that was no longer practical. I used to heap scorn upon the little “knuckletrap” cups that come with Punch sets. That was because they’re ugly and tiny. I still do, but only because of the ugly. The Georgian silver Punch ladle in my possession, you see, holds but two ounces, just enough to fill one of the slender, stemmed V-shaped glasses from which the eighteenth century tended to drink its Punch and its wine. Not everyone agreed—there were half-pint “rummers” aplenty, and “bumpers,” which technically meant any glass filled up to surface tension (hence the “bump”) but in practice carried a certain notion of size, so that one might be embarrassed to identify anything less than a gill-sized glass—four ounces—as such. But in general, the glasses were not large.

That’s as it should be, as I’ve learned. Half the fun of a bowl of Punch is in the ritual of it; in the ladling and interacting at the bowl, in the number of glasses drained, in the toasting, and so on. More small servings trump fewer large ones on all counts. One of my prized possessions is the box of thirty-six V-shaped two-ounce Libbey sherry glasses given to me by John Gertsen, of Drink in Boston. Every time it comes out, it’s a party.

I’ve used those glasses with several different bowls. Unfortunately, not a one is a silver heirloom chased with the family crest and so large that it doubled as a baptismal font for ten generations of Wondriches. You don’t have one of those, either? Pity. But here’s the thing: I’ve made Punch successfully in silver bowls, ones of fine china and of expensive cut glass. I’ve also made it successfully in pasta pots, Le Creuset Dutch ovens, plastic bowls, melamine bowls, tin buckets, spackle buckets, salad spinners, highway-crew coolers (you know, the big round orange thing with the cup dispenser on the side and the spigot at the bottom), milk jugs (just cut a hole between the handle and the spout to fit the ice in), five-gallon water-cooler jugs, candy dishes, candy jars, Lexans of all sizes, nameless orange plastic things from Home Depot, large earthenware flower-pots, galvanized washtubs and a host of other miscellaneous vessels I’m not recalling. I have not made it in a washing machine, but I know someone who has. I have not made it in a building—yes, a
building
—but I know someone who has. A nice bowl is a luxury, not an essential.