Punch (15 page)

For Lime Punch, skip this stage entirely.

Squeeze the reserved lemons and enough others to get 6 ounces of juice. Pass the juice through a fine-mesh strainer (this step is optional, but it yields a clearer Punch and—no small consideration—makes everything easier to clean). Stir the juice into the oleo-saccharum and then remove the lemon peels with a slotted spoon and discard them (unless, that is, you prefer to keep them in as garnish).

Add to the sherbet one 750-milliliter bottle of spirits. Use what you like, of course, but for the purposes of illustration, let’s go with the Bushmills 10—or perhaps a mixture of 9 ounces of Smith & Cross Jamaican rum and 16 ounces of Martell VS cognac. Stir. Taste.

Before serving, add to the Punch base 4½ cups of cool water. Taste. If too strong, add more water unless you’re adding ice. If you are doing so, do it now, deploying either a quart-sized block if the Punch is meant to be ladled out slowly, or enough ice cubes to fill the bowl halfway if it’s meant to be served all at once.

Grate about a quarter of a nutmeg on top.

Garnish? What’s that?

Hot Punch is considerably simpler to make.

In a mixing bowl, prepare an oleo-saccharum, as on page 95, with four lemons and 8 ounces sugar (hot Punch needs to be sweeter than cold Punch). When this is ready, scrape it into a large earthenware jug that has been prewarmed by rinsing it with boiling water (or, of course, a hot Crock-Pot). Add 12 ounces boiling water and stir.

In short order, add one 750-milliliter bottle of spirits—here, let’s go with the Bowmore Legend single-malt Scotch.

Add another 3 cups of boiling water. Taste. If too strong, add a little more water.

Spice is not strictly necessary here, but if you wish to add it, now is the time; as above.

To keep your Punch hot, you’ll need a fireplace complete with roaring fire to put it in front of, with a napkin stuffed into the mouth of the jug to keep in the steam, as Dickens suggests. Or, of course, the Crock-Pot.

Archaic English currency, I can understand. Four farthings make a penny, twelve pennies a shilling, five shillings a crown, four crowns a pound, twenty-one shillings a guinea. Archaic English measures of length, piece of cake. Archaic English measures of liquid volume, though. . . . The part that makes my head explode isn’t so much the measures themselves, which are simple enough (anyone who was born in the land of inches, feet, yards and miles has also grown up with ounces, cups, pints, quarts and gallons). Four ounces are a gill or quartern, four gills or quarterns a pint, two pints a quart, two quarts a pottle and two pottles a gallon. Quantities beyond that we’re unlikely to use. I can even get around the uncertainty about what to call the measure that fits between a gill and a pint. Is it a tumbler, a breakfast cup or merely a half-pint (by far the most common designation)? No matter. What does matter, though, is the fact that a gallon is not always a gallon nor a quart a quart. It depends, you see, on what you’re measuring and when and where you’re doing it.

If you were measuring ale in England before 1824, you used a gallon of 282 cubic inches. If, however, it was wine you were measuring, that gallon would only be 231 cubic inches. Quarts of either were proportioned accordingly. There was, believe it or not, some kind of method in this. Ale foams, wine does not, and nobody wants to pay for foam. So let’s just make the ale measures bigger, to allow for that foam—let’s say, add another quarter, so that four ale quarts equal five wine ones. The system worked more or less tolerably as long as it was just ale or beer you were measuring on the one side and wine on the other. But what if it was, say, aqua vitae? Which measure do you use then? The original rationale for the two-tier system having been forgotten pretty much as soon as it was instituted, there was a lot of confusion about that, and confusion plus money equals litigation. By the middle of the seventeenth century, it was a settled point of law that spirits used wine measures. Fair enough.

But then there’s the problem of bottles. Wine and spirits, when not sold directly from the tap, were put in quart bottles. Only the quart wasn’t a quart. “It is the custom of the trade,” as
The English Mechanic and World of Science
noted in 1886, “to sell six bottles to the [imperial] gallon,” while still calling them quarts. About that imperial gallon: in 1824, George IV got rid of the wine gallon and made the ale gallon the standard but kept the wine-sized ounce, which is to say a pint suddenly went up by 25 percent to be 20 ounces, making a quart 40 and a gallon 160. That meant that those wine quarts held only 26 ounces. America, having opted out of that whole empire business, kept the wine gallon as it was and ditched the ale measures; that meant that we had only five “quart” bottles to the gallon. I have grossly oversimplified this, but it’s complicated enough this way.
^al
All I can say is, when you see a quantity specified in an old Punch recipe, let taste be your guide. Oh, and the quantities in my “Suggested Procedures” and “Notes” accompanying the recipes in Book III are wine or American measures—unless, of course, they’re metric. Speaking of which, the metric equivalents below are approximate, for ease of use.

THE PUNCHES

Every written recipe is by its very nature incomplete. Each one assumes shared knowledge and judgment between the writer and the reader. Even an instruction as straightforward as “stir with ice” presumes a great deal of contextual knowledge. Over time, though, that contextual knowledge falls away, so that the older the recipe, the less certain we can be of our interpretation of it. We read “stir with ice” in a Cocktail book published last year and we’ll fill a mixing glass two-thirds full of ice, slide the bowl of a twisted-handled bar spoon down to the bottom of it and waltz the contents around in neat, counterclockwise circles, pushing the spoon with our fingers away from us and pulling it back toward us until we have counted to fifty. Even if we’re not quite so adept as that, at least we’ve seen people who are do it and have a general idea of the process. In 1862, however, that may have meant twirling the liquid around once or twice with a single lump of ice the size of a pigeon’s egg, thus producing a drink not nearly as cold as what we’re picturing and a hell of a lot less diluted.

Reconstructing historic recipes is full of pitfalls, involving as it does culinary history, social history, linguistics and a whole lot of other “istics” and “ologies,” all blended with a healthy shot of guesswork. It’s far too easy to use our own assumptions to fill in the blanks. As a check against these assumptions, I’ve done my best to provide a verbatim transcript of my source for each recipe before giving any interpretation of my own. That way, should my interpretation prove unsatisfactory, as no doubt sometimes it will, you have a foundation upon which to build your own. For the more straightforward recipes, my interpretation is confined to a set of explanatory notes; for the others, I’ve provided a complete recipe. But please bear in mind that my suggestions are just that. If you’ve got a better way of doing it, trust yourself. The brands I’ve included are by way of example; if there’s something you prefer, use it.

Only a handful of recipes or reconstitutable descriptions for Punch have reached us from the seventeenth century; I’ve included most of them here. There are many more from the eighteenth century, but most are redundant. I’ve tried to include the ones that aren’t. In the nineteenth century, recipes for Punch multiply into an ungodly profusion. At the same time, what was direct and elemental becomes complex and ornamental. Variation shades into dissipation, and novelty replaces innovation. I’ve included far less of them.

In assigning the Punches to their species and kinds, I’ve tried to the best of my ability to do it in a way that the people who made and drank Punch in the years of its dominion would have recognized. The resulting categories, therefore, reflect a somewhat uneasy mix of history and mixology—but then again, so do the generally accepted categories of Cocktails. In any case, my categories are at least a starting place.

The terms “Pirate Juice,” “Planter’s Best” and “Stiggins’s Delight,” used to categorize rums, are explained in Book II.

Finally, I’ve given an approximate—very approximate—yield for each recipe, in cups. In 1862, Jerry Thomas suggested one should “allow a quart for four persons,” but he also noted that “this information must be taken
cum grano salis
; for the capacities of persons for this kind of beverage are generally supposed to vary considerably.” Too true, too true. A cup of Punch is four eighteenth-century-sized glasses, after which many people will stop. Others will get much deeper into the bowl. In other words, you’ll have to figure out how much your friends are good for; I can’t help you with that. They’re
your
friends.

ARRACK PUNCH, ALIAS RACK PUNCH

On February 1, 1659, Henry Aldworth, an East India Company factor in Bengal, wrote his friend Thomas Davies that he and his colleague Job Charnock—one of the great names in the company’s history, who would go on to found Calcutta—greatly missed his fellowship, “which wee have often remembered in a bowle of the cleerest Punch, having noe better liquor.” There is an irony here: once Punch caught on in England, there were many very fancy people indeed for whom there was “noe better liquor” than the Arrack Punch with which Messrs. Aldworth and Charnock were forced to make do.

Henry Fielding made use of that fact in his popular 1730 farce,
The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great
, in which he has King Arthur issue one of the great royal decrees in literature: “To-day it is our Pleasure to be drunk, / And this our Queen shall be as drunk as we.” While his queen is nothing loath in theory, she does have her scruples:

The king answers with the magnanimity that is the sign of true-bred royalty: