Punch (28 page)

To make capillaire (English style): stir 2 cups white sugar together with 1 cup water over low heat until sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat, add ⅛ ounce orange-flower water (the Lebanese Mymouné brand, available in Middle Eastern groceries, is excellent), stir and let cool. Bottle and keep refrigerated.

In 1827, an Oxford printer put out a little paperback pamphlet titled
Oxford Night Caps, being a Collection of Receipts for making Various Beverages used in the University
. Only thirty-four pages long, with forty “receipts,” it was the first book ever published devoted entirely to mixed drinks. Its authorship has been attributed to one Richard Cook, born 1799, about whom I have been able to find nothing amusing or interesting. Whoever he was, Cook was an educated man, or at least good at faking it: the book omitted none of the footnotes, classical allusions and scraps of Greek and Latin then obligatory for a work of convivial literature. As with Jerry Thomas’s
Bar-Tenders Guide
, for which it would to some degree serve as a model, the drinks it presented were a motley mix of the archaic and the up-to-date. Metheglin and Sack-Posset are included, but so are a number of the wine-based Cups that were beginning to replace Punch in polite society.

 

Yet there are also thirteen recipes for Punch, including this one. A glance at the formula reveals that this is no Sir-Tobyby-the-Fireside Punch, nothing that a country gent could whip up on the sideboard while talking dogs and horses with the squire from down the road. Where does one start? Along with Regent’s Punch and Boston Club Punch, this is one of the most complicated recipes in this book. But anything drunk at Oxford in the glory days of mandatory Greek and Latin has got to be worth preserving. And who knows? One day, you might just have an occasion so special, a guest so honored, an anniversary so long in coming, that no ordinary drink will do. Anyone can spend money, but to assemble something like this, another of the high peaks of the Punchmaker’s art, speaks of true love. (If you do make it, the gamesman in me suggests you display the recipe on a placard by the Punch bowl to, uh, satisfy the curious.)

Extract the juice from the rind of three lemons, by rubbing loaf sugar on them. The peeling of two Seville oranges and two lemons, cut extremely thin. The juice of four Seville oranges and ten lemons. Six glasses of calves-foot jelly in a liquid state. The above to be put into a jug, and stirred well together. Pour two quarts of boiling water on the mixture, cover the jug closely, and place it near the fire for a quarter of an hour. Then strain the liquid through a sieve into a punch bowl or jug, sweeten it with a bottle of capillaire, and add half a pint of white wine, a pint of French brandy, a pint of Jamaica rum, and a bottle of orange shrub; the mixture to be stirred as the spirits are poured in. If not sufficiently sweet, add loaf sugar gradually in small quantities, or a spoonful or two of capillaire. To be served either hot or cold.* The Oxford Punch, when made with half the quantity of spirituous liquors and placed in an ice tub for a short time, is a pleasant summer beverage.

In making this Punch, limes are sometimes used instead of lemons, but they are by no means so wholesome.**

With one or two modifications, the basic procedure here is sound. Begin with an oleo-saccharum of five lemons, two Seville oranges and ½ cup white sugar; don’t worry about including the peels in the initial jugging of the jelly and the juices—their work is done, and they may be discarded. For the jelly, mix two ¼-ounce packets of gelatin, bloomed in ½ cup cold water as directed on the packet, with 2 cups warm water, and use this in place of the “six [wine-]glasses” the recipe calls for. The wine can be anything, really, as long as it’s French, white and reasonably dry. The brandy should be VSOP cognac—again, this is not an everyday recipe—and the rum a Planter’s Best type or better. For the capillaire, see Limmer’s Gin Punch, in Chapter XV. Clément, the makers of a very fine Martinique rhum agricole, also make and export a very fine orange shrub, which is nothing more than their rum infused with orange peels and a few subtle spices and sweetened with cane syrup; use 16 ounces of that and 8 ounces water. (If you can’t find that, make an orange shrub by preparing an oleo-saccharum of 8 ounces demerara sugar and the peel of four Seville oranges, dissolving it in 8 ounces boiling water, adding 12 ounces VS-grade cognac and straining and bottling the result.) These last two ingredients should be added to taste. Remember that the pints here are probably 20-ounce imperial ones (the book came out only a year after the new measures were adopted, so it could go either way). When this is mixed, it should be bottled and promptly refrigerated. If serving it cold, you don’t want to spoil the texture by adding ice.

The general quantity here amounts to a little less than a gallon and a half of liquid if Cook was using wine measure, or a little more if they were imperial. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of assembling the ingredients, I suggest you double or triple the recipe and really do it up.

As Gary Regan observes in his modern classic
The Joy of Mixology
, Jell-O shots, although “looked upon by most people as an abomination created by young bartenders in the 1980s, . . . actually date back to at least the mid-1800s.” An extension of an Oxford-style Punch with enough gelatin added to make it completely jellify, if that’s a word, jellied Punch starts turning up in recipe books in the 1830s, although it may be rather older than that. While more of a curiosity than a full-fledged, working drink, it does have its conceivable uses. As Jerry Thomas noted in 1862, “This preparation is a very agreeable refreshment on a cold night.” Careful, though: the professor also very rightly warns that it be used in moderation, as “the strength of the punch is so artfully concealed by its admixture with the gelatine, that many persons, particularly of the softer sex, have been tempted to partake so plentifully of it as to render them somewhat unfit for waltzing or quadrilling after supper.” I would be particularly wary of the quadrilling.

Make a good bowl of punch. . . . To every pint of punch add an ounce and a half of isinglass, dissolved in a quarter pint of water (about half a tumbler full); pour this into the punch whilst still quite hot, and then fill your moulds, taking care they are not disturbed until the jelly is completely set.

You can turn most any Punch into Punch Jelly, but you’ll have to leave out some of the water, watch the citrus (acid keeps the gelatin from setting, so if it’s a citrusy Punch, try using two-thirds of the normal quantity) and, as Mr. Regan suggests, add more sugar; sugars help the gelatin to set and give it flavor. For the gelatin, the regular calf’s-foot kind works just fine and is a hell of a lot easier to find than isinglass. To incorporate it, for every pint of Punch the original recipe makes, omit 1 cup water from the recipe. Once you have prepared the punch base thus, dissolve as many ¼-ounce packets of gelatin in as many cups of hot water as you have omitted from the recipe (make sure to bloom them first in 2 ounces cold water each), stir to activate and then stir in the Punch. Pour it into a Jell-O mold and refrigerate.

I’m particularly fond of this when it’s made with the more outré flavors of Punch, such as Islay Scotch or Batavia arrack. A Regent’s Punch jelly, though, is truly divine.