Punch (26 page)

Follow the same steps as for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch (on previous page). Once the Punch is prepared, let it cool, strain it and refrigerate it in a sealed container. For Lemon Punch, as Thomas notes, “a small proportion of juice is added before the whiskey is poured in.” Three ounces should do it. Serve in a bowl poured over a one-quart block of ice.

In a three-quart bowl, prepare an oleo-saccharum with 8 ounces white sugar and the peel of two lemons. Add 1½ ounces lemon juice and 8 ounces water and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add 12 ounces cask-strength rye or bourbon, stir again and add between 3 and 6 cups of cold water, to taste. A quart-sized block of ice or enough cubes or pieces of it to fill the bowl past halfway are an excellent addition.

Infuse the lemons and the pineapple in the spirits for six hours without squeezing. Dissolve 12 ounces white sugar in 12 cups water, add the spirits—complete with fruit—and the rest of the water, refrigerate for a couple of hours, slip in a large block of ice and serve.

Follow the steps for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch (page 190), but double all quantities.

GIN PUNCH

Gin Punch” is a combination of words that would have struck Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries not unlike the way “Crack Martini” strikes us today. King William’s laudable attempt to strengthen English farmers hadn’t turned out quite the way he planned. I won’t get into the Gin Craze here; books have been written about it, and good ones (see, for example, Patrick Dillon’s
Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva
). Suffice it to say that by the second decade of the eighteenth century, “geneva” (the English mangling of the Dutch
jenever
), or “gin” for short, had become the intoxicant of choice—or rather, of necessity—for the scrabbling urban masses, just as destructive as crack but far more widely used. In this case, the Repression stage was fully warranted. A locally distilled knockoff of Dutch genever, geneva was nothing more than raw pot-still whiskey infused with something to hide the “nauseous,” “gross” and “fetid” taste of the grain. The most conscientious distillers would use juniper berries for this, as did the Dutch. Everyone else used turpentine. The only thing to recommend it was its price: when arrack cost eighteen shillings a gallon, gin cost two.

Thus, the ludicrousness of “Gin Punch.” Punch was high-church, gin the lowest of the low. And indeed, most gin-drinkers avoided the odious comparison by guzzling it in straight drams or, at best, tipping it into a mug of ale. But mixology is no respecter of boundaries, and by the 1730s, we start to see people making Punch with gin. Admittedly, they were not people of the best class: escaped convicts, Grub Street writers, Americans and the like.
The Fortunate Imposter
, an anonymous 1759 novel, locates it perfectly when it has its hero share a “twelve-penny bowl of hot
Gin-Punch
” with a “club of beggars.” But the eighteenth century was a time of change, and as we have seen demonstrated so often in the story of Punch, time has a way of reconciling opposites. By the last quarter of the century, Gin Punch had ceased to be oxymoronic and had won a foothold in the citadel of acceptable drinks. It helped that with the Gin Craze having burned itself out, the hundreds upon hundreds of backroom distillers operating in the 1730s had been winnowed down to a much smaller number of large, technologically sophisticated players who made a product such that people could see good qualities in it other than cheapness. Indeed, the quality of the spirit had improved so much that some doctors took advantage of the widely touted diuretic properties of the juniper berry and prescribed Gin Punch to their patients. Another sign of progress: in 1776, James Boswell, then a respectable attorney, wrote in his diary, “I drank rather too much gin punch. It was a new liquor to me, and I liked it much.”