Punch (16 page)

True, this is fiction. But these were in fact the prevailing prices at the time, eight shillings being the very rough equivalent, in percentage of a yearly living wage, to $250. Not cheap. (That makes the day in 1736 when Robert Hobart, an underage student on an allowance of seven shillings a week, spent thirty-five shillings on Arrack Punch “sent to his lodging” from Gally’s Coffee House a truly memorable spree.) In the real England, one of the participants in the temperance debates of 1736, when Parliament, seeking to quash the gin trade and thus dry out the lower classes, also considered banning the retail sale of Punch, correctly identified the class that would be most affected when he noted that “our drinkers of Arrack Punch will most of them betake themselves to the drinking of
French
clarets.”

Although in point of plain quality, “rack,” as it was commonly known, was probably better than any other available spirit save the most carefully sourced French cognac, it was nonetheless a taste that needed acquiring, and some preferred not to. “I don’t love rack punch,” Jonathan Swift wrote to his beloved Stella in 1711; “I love it better with brandy; are you of my opinion?” History is silent as to whether she was or not. Swift never did reconcile himself to it, judging by the lines he wrote years later to his Punch-swilling friend Dr. Sheridan: “But if rack punch you still would swallow / I then forewarn’d you what would follow.” Whether it excited fear of its notorious ability to cause hangovers or fastidiousness of taste or pocketbook, Rack Punch did have a way of creating strong dissenters. William Hickey, for example, who encountered it frequently during the 1760s in the better London brothels, had, as he put it in his memoirs, “an uncommon dislike” of it and would just pretend to take sips from the passed bowl, focusing his energies rather on “romping and playing all sorts of tricks with the girls.” (I’d like to think that one could do both.) Nonetheless, the dissenters were a minority, and Arrack Punch retained its primacy throughout the English-speaking world and beyond.
^am
In the later part of the century, one of the practices of London insurance companies was to ladle out Arrack Punch to customers both actual and potential when they stopped by the offices. Beats a plastic key chain, anyway.

Even in America, the Land That Rum Built, there was real Arrack Punch from the early days, and it was popular enough. In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd struck out deep into the American hinterland on a mission to determine the Virginia-Carolina border, he found the locals moistening the clay with such rustic concoctions as Bombo—basically, strong Rum Toddy (i.e., rum, sugar and water) without the crucial scrape of nutmeg that makes it fit for civilized ingestion—and the by turns frightening and alluring “Fricassee of Rum” (“They Fry’d half a Dozen Rashers of very fat Bacon in a Pint of Rum, both which being disht up together, serv’d the Company at once for meat and Drink”). But he also found Colonel Harvey Harrison, whose “good house was enough to spoil us for Woodsmen,” as he wrote in his diary: there they “drank Rack-Punch” in the evening and “trod on Carpets” when they went to bed.

Considering that mercantilist trade policies dictated that that arrack had to be shipped from India or points east to England be-fore it could be transshipped to America, where it then had to be carried practically by hand into the backcountry, you can imagine what it cost. Even in the more settled parts of the country, it was expensive. In 1736, when Virginian William Randolph bought a twenty-four-hundred-acre tract of Crown land that happened to include a parcel his friend Peter Jefferson had had his eye on, he agreed to sell Jefferson two hundred acres of it for fifty pounds and another two hundred in return for, as the deed reads, “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of arrack punch to him delivered.”
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By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, though, Arrack Punch had begun to lose its grip, both in America and in the mother country. In 1829,
The Southern Review
, published in Charles-ton, South Carolina, gave notice of that when it mocked Louis Eustache Ude, who had been cook to the unfortunate Louis XVI, for recommending in his 1827 magnum opus,
The French Cook
, that certain characteristic English dishes

Arrack Punch didn’t die out entirely, to be sure, at least not right away; there were always a few epicures for whom anything else was a mere understudy—men like Henry William Herbert, the pioneer American sportswriter, who always made himself a glass of Arrack Punch before retiring for the night. But its fate foreshadowed that of Punch in general: from daily service, it was remanded to the reserves, only to be called up in times of great mixological crisis. The wealthy and the celebrated stopped sluicing themselves with it, those who would be either stopped affecting it and those who would be neither stopped aspiring to it. In 1838, as if to put a period on its years of imperium, its greatest proponent died.

From the last years of the old century until 1831, when he resigned his post at age eighty-six, Captain Charles Morris was the spirit presiding over the venerable and riotous London institution known as the “Sublime Society of Beef Steaks,” founded in 1735. At five o’clock every Saturday from November to June, twenty-five aristocratic sports and their guests gathered together to eat nothing but grilled steak (with a few fixings) and drink nothing but port wine and Arrack Punch (the society had been limited to twenty-four until 1785, when George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales, wanted in). Morris, who had an extraordinary facility for throwing together impromptu verses and songs, many of them quite frank in their diction, was sort of a song-leader and, more to the point, the man in charge of making the Punch. “It was amusing to see him at his laboratory at the sideboard,” one initiate later recalled, “stocked with the various products that enter into the composition of that nectareous mixture: then smacking an elementary glass or two, and giving a significant nod, the fiat of its excellence.” Alas, if Morris’s exact recipe survives, I have not been able to find it; all we have are tantalizing descriptions of the “mantling beauties” of this “potent” and “fascinating draught ‘That flames and dances in its crystal bound’” (the quote is from Milton’s youth, before England knew Punch). In any case, these sparse descriptions of the captain’s Punch-making suggest that in his rendition, it was somewhat more elaborate than the old East India Company version; after all, he was mixing for royals and aristocrats, and the Prince of Wales, for one, had very elaborate tastes indeed when it came to Punch (see Regent’s Punch in Chapter XVII).

At least the society’s arrack would’ve been genuine Batavia. That was not always the case—London’s Vauxhall Gardens was famous for serving an Arrack Punch in which the “arrack” was in fact nothing more than cheap rum flavored with benzoin, a kind of tree gum. As Thackeray notes in
Vanity Fair
, a work in which Vauxhall’s Rack Punch plays a brief but pivotal role, “there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch.” Thus speaketh experience. But right through the end of the nineteenth century you could still find true arrack if you looked hard enough, although it grew increasingly uncommon in the English-speaking world (Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia kept it much more present). Imagine the dismay those Punchy old-timers felt when they stopped in at the spirits merchant’s for a bottle of his finest old Batavia only to be told “we don’t get no call for it anymore, sorry.” That’s the risk one runs by having archaic tastes, by standing against the general degeneration of the age. I felt the same heartsink when they stopped importing the old Bols green-bottle genever or when, one after another, the bonded bourbons were edged off the liquor-store shelf to make room for another flavored vodka. For the arrack-drinker, it must have been vermouth, crème de violette and London dry gin that did the dirty deed.

But we live in times of wonder, and the rack is back—which means that this chapter need not be a purely theoretical one. Here, then, are five ways of making Arrack Punch, two from the beginning of its career and three from what was until recently the end.

Break up 8 ounces of jaggery or palm sugar and put it into a three-quart Punch bowl. Add 8 ounces lime juice and muddle together until all the sugar has dissolved. Add 1 quart Sri Lankan palm arrack (or any other palm arrack) and stir. Add 5 cups water and grate nutmeg over the top.