Punch (23 page)

This, the oldest extant recipe for Milk Punch, has the advantages of (relative) simplicity, strength and deliciousness—and, appropriately, it was written by a woman. According to Montague Summers, who unearthed this recipe in 1914, it hails from “a tattered manuscript recipe book, the compilation of a good housewife named Mary Rockett, and dated 1711.” Milk Punch is just about the most conservative corner of the kingdom of Punches; Mrs. Rockett’s recipe agrees on all cardinal points with those of her successors, right through the 1860s.

Like all Milk Punches, the result of this process is something between a Punch and a liqueur. Most people, rather than constantly repeating the time-consuming procedures necessary to make it, would prepare it in quantity, bottle it and cellar it—without the milk solids that would otherwise go rancid, Milk Punch would (and will) keep almost indefinitely. To help with that preservation, it was generally made with a rather richer, sweeter texture than on-the-spot Punches. Poured straight from the bottle, if chilled it’s silky and unctuous enough to close a meal. As an aperitif, though, it requires additional dilution.

To make Milk Punch. Infuse the rinds of 8 Lemons in a Gallon of Brandy 48 hours then add 5 Quarts of Water and 2 pounds of Loaf Sugar then Squize the Juices of all the lemons to these Ingredients add 2 Quarts of new milk Scald hot stirring the whole till it crudles [
sic
] grate in 2 Nutmegs let the whole infuse 1 Hour then refine through a flannel Bag.

As archaic as this recipe sounds, it’s actually quite straightforward and laid out in most efficient order. Twenty-four hours are more than enough for infusing the peels (which should be cut very thin with a vegetable peeler). Four quarts of water should be enough with the weaker spirits of today. In general, Milk Punch was made with brandy, although we hear of rum as well; if using rum, use a mild, mellow one of the Planter’s Best grade. Arrack would be, well, challenging, but Scotch and Irish whiskey had their proponents, and with reason. I have heard tell of people these days making Mezcal Milk Punch—well, one person, Scott Marshall, of Boston (he, being a maniac, also cubed and fried the strained-out curds, which though edible are somewhat unappetizing without the application of boiling fat). The milk in 1711 would have been unpasteurized, naturally, and with all its cream; if raw milk is legal in your vicinity, that’s the thing to use (check the farmers’ market, if you’ve got one). Otherwise, whole milk will do. You’ll need to strain this through a tight-woven cloth, so that you can squeeze the curds to extract every bit of Punch; try that in a paper towel and you’ll be starting over in no time (see Chapter VII). After “refining,” bottle this and refrigerate it until what needs to precipitate has precipitated and what needs to settle has settled. Siphon off the clear liquid, rebottle it and you can store it at cellar temperature.

There were those who recommended adding jelly, the other great softening ingredient, to Milk Punch (see Oxford Punch). As
Oxford Night Caps
observed in 1827, this is gilding the lily, “as the milk will sufficiently temper the acrimony of the lemon juice.”

At the beginning of 1731, Ashley, a thirty-three-year-old “wholesale dealer in cheese,” abandoned that line of work, it “not suiting his turn” (as the
Monthly Magazine
wrote in 1796). Instead, he opened the “London Coffee-House and Punch-House,” on the north side of Ludgate Hill right next to the old medieval gate. The cheese trade must have been good to him, as it seems to have been a pretty large place, not wide but very deep, with rooms ranged along a narrow passageway that led to a court in the back from which one could scuttle through other passageways and end up at the Old Bailey. But Ashley was no dope. Those who knew him described the Northampton native as “an intelligent cheerful man” who was “intimately acquainted with every remarkable transaction in the history of London” and “well versed in the history and laws of his country.” Perhaps too well in the latter: according to the
Monthly Magazine
, his business “would have been greatly productive, had he not contracted a taste for litigation, which involved him in many tedious and expensive law suits.” This statement is borne out by Ashley’s sole publication, a 1753 pamphlet giving his side of one of them. It would probably have been better for him, and for us, if he had written about something he knew even better than law and history—making Punch. Ashley, you see, was no ordinary Punch-maker; he was, in fact, the world’s first celebrity mixologist, the first man to become famous for compounding and selling a mixed drink.

 

Everybody knew James Ashley. Some did from drinking Punch at his establishment: Hogarth was a patron, the young James Boswell stopped in one night in 1763 for “three threepenny bowls” in between bouts with sixpenny whores,
^aw
Oliver Goldsmith took the temperature of the town there and, for a time, Benjamin Franklin’s “Club of Honest Whigs” was one of the many it hosted. Others knew him from the newspapers—not so much from the editorial content, although he appeared in that often enough, as from the advertisements. I don’t think a day went by between March 1731, when Ashley first took to print, and July 1776, when he died, that one of his ads didn’t appear in a London newspaper. Not everyone drank in Punch houses or lounged around in coffeehouses reading newspapers, but even those who didn’t would have known Ashley, if only because Ludgate Hill was a major shopping street and if you walked down it you couldn’t miss the two iron Punch bowls on ornate openwork pedestals that flanked his door, with a third above it. If those didn’t grab you, the words he had painted in massive letters on the front of his building would:

They certainly made an impression; for many years whenever anyone made protestations that their profitable actions were being done “for the public good,” Ashley and his “pro bono publico”—“for the public good”—was sure to be invoked.

Not that his claim was wrong, mind you. It was overstated, to be sure—Alexander Radcliffe, Ned Ward and Lord Russell might have given him an argument about the last three lines (then again, Russell would argue with anybody about anything). But Ashley’s constant promotion certainly did nothing to hurt Punch. And the price part was absolutely correct: as Fielding’s Tom Thumb confirms, “the settled Price throughout the Town” (as Ashley’s earliest ads noted) was eight shillings for a quart of arrack made into Punch, and six for brandy or rum. Ashley’s prices? Six and four shillings respectively. His innovations didn’t stop there. Six shillings was still a hell of an outlay, the equivalent of almost two hundred dollars. Of course, a quart of spirits made for a large bowl; there were smaller. But if Ashley is to be believed, even those customarily only went down to one shilling sixpence, or just shy of fifty dollars, for which you would get a half-pint of liquor. Here he broke ranks: rather than a half-pint, he set as the smallest quantity of spirits he’d make into Punch the almost trivial measure of a half quartern, or two ounces. Suddenly we’re in Cocktail territory: rather than a bowl of Punch, this would give the drinker one not very large glass. For that, he would pay three to four and a half pence, depending on the liquor—say, eight to twelve dollars. (A quart of porter, by contrast, also cost threepence.)

The London Punch-House’s titular beverage was not only retailed by the glass (known as a “sneaker,” “tiff” or “rub”), but going by the claims in Ashley’s ads, it was also mixed to order—“the Sherbett is always brought by itself, and the Brandy, Rum and Arrack in the Measure”—and so quickly that “Gentlemen may have it as soon made as a Gill of Wine can be drawn.” To make a system like that work, Ashley had to prepare his shrub in advance—the “acid” in it being “all Orange Juice”—and bottle it. Then it was easy: show the customer the spirit in the measure, pour it into the proper-size bowl, pour in two measures’ worth of shrub (I would’ve used the same measure), nutmeg and done. The fact that Ashley made rather a big deal of all these practices indicates that they were not standard, as does the amount of time he spent complaining in his ads about imitators and even the amount of time some of his imitators spent frankly acknowledging his influence.
^ax
This was professional Punch-making on a higher level. This was bartending.

And yet it’s unlikely that Ashley himself was doing any of it. Sure, someone was in the little compartment set in the wall that served as a bar in eighteenth-century Punch- and coffeehouses; someone was serving out Punch to the “egregious sots / Who pour its Poison down devouring Throats / . . . standing at the Bar / At
Ashley
’s,” as Joseph Mitchell wrote in his 1735 “A Curse Upon Punch.”
^ay
But that somebody was in all likelihood not James Ashley for the simple reason that, as we have noted, in England, “bar-keeper” was not a man’s job. And indeed, along with portraits of Ashley and his wife, we find that his friend Thomas Worlidge (alias “the English Rembrandt”) executed one of “a Mrs. Gaywood, their bar-keeper.” So. A mixologist, perhaps, our Mr. Ashley, but not a bartender. Whatever he was, he did it well enough to stay in business for forty-five years: when he died, on July 7, 1776, the London Punch-House was still going strong.