Punch (31 page)

Having written about this, the most enduringly famous of American Punches, in both
Esquire Drinks
and
Imbibe!
, I wasn’t planning to do so here. But writing a book about Punch without including it just didn’t feel right. As I was pondering that, a reader of
Imbibe!
fortuitously sent me a newspaper article she had come across with the oldest recipe for this foundational American drink yet discovered. It dates from 1795, if we are to believe the Philadelphia
Telegraph
, which found it sandwiched between the leaves of a history of what is now America’s oldest club in the library of a noted local bibliophile. It agrees in every major detail, anyway, with the one Jerry Thomas printed from Charles Godfrey Leland, a Philadelphia lawyer who was a member, or “citizen,” of “the State in Schuylkill,” the Philadelphia fishing club responsible for unleashing it upon the world.

An interesting little volume, also, is the Memoirs of the Schuylkill Fishing Club. . . . Many original papers are sandwiched between the leaves, giving accounts of some of the club’s jubilations, and containing a written recipe for punch, as follows:

Begin by dissolving the sugar (1 pound should do, unless you like your Punch very sweet) in the lemon or lime juice (by Leland’s day, lemon had become the orthodox souring). An oleo-saccharum is also not a bad idea here; use the peel of twelve lemons. In
Imbibe!
I spilled a fair amount of ink lamenting the loss of various old-time ingredients and coming up with kludges to work around their absence. Since then, we have been graced with such revenants as Batavia arrack, Hollands, Old Tom gin, real absinthe, crème de violette and one or two others that I’m forgetting. So I will not despair about the loss of peach brandy, an eau-de-vie of peaches distilled on the crushed pits and then left alone to slumber in oaken barrels. For many years, it was the most prized spirit in America, judging from the prices it brought. The last commercial distiller I know of to make it in any quantity was Lem Motlow. If you can’t place the name, consult the label of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He only stopped making it in the 1940s, so who knows, there might be a bottle of it floating around somewhere. Good luck. Or you can keep an eye on the microdistillers. There’s already one version—Kuchan, from California—and it ain’t bad. As for kludges: I like 3 ounces bonded applejack and 1 ounce good, imported peach liqueur. Serve iced; 7 pints of water should be enough.

The thirty members of the Richmond, Virginia, Quoit Club, founded in 1788, met every other Saturday from May until October “under the shade of some fine oaks,” as one visitor recalled, at Buchanan’s Spring, right outside of town. There they would throw the heavy, ringlike quoits at posts, eat barbecue and drink themselves silly on Mint Julep, Toddy and this, the club’s Punch, which was prepared with great skill by Jasper Crouch, their black cook.

The club’s most famous member was one of its founders, John Marshall, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835, the longest tenure in the court’s history. For a great man, Marshall retained a sense of humor. As the story goes, on his watch the court cut down on the convivial tippling that had been such a part of colonial public life to the point that the justices only allowed themselves wine when the weather was wet. But, as Joseph Story, one of his fellow justices, used to recount,

Now
that’s
legal reasoning.

The following recipe for the punch used I got from an old Virginia gentleman: lemons, brandy, rum, madeira, poured into a bowl one-third filled with ice (no water), and sweetened. This same recipe was used by the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, an organization that covered itself with glory during our Civil War. The Blues served this punch for years in a handsome India china bowl which held thirty-two gallons and which they greatly mourned when it was lost when the Spotswood Hotel burned on Christmas Eve, 1870.

Do not operate heavy machinery or make constitutional law after consuming this. For the rum, I like something in the Planter’s Best line here, with just maybe a dollop of Pirate Juice to spark it up.

In my mind, I can’t divorce the Daniel Webster of history, the great Massachusetts senator, the orator, the statesman, from the Daniel Webster of the movies, the one played by Edward Arnold in William Dieterle’s 1941 version of Stephen Vincent Benét’s sardonic fable “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” As played by Arnold, he’s a bluff, jovial sort, a social man who knows how to get along with the people, and yet he has quiet, watchful eyes and the native shrewdness to know bullshit when he sees it, no matter how many flowers are growing out of it. Actually, in this case, fiction and history pretty much agree.

As part of that joviality, Webster did nothing to combat a reputation for liking to take a drink now and then. But while he might have forgotten himself from time to time, he seems to have been one of those drinkers who will sip from the glass and expound on the nectar within, only to set it quietly aside when the conversation has moved on. That makes me somewhat suspect the authenticity of this recipe for Punch, labeled as “Daniel Webster’s” by the author of a New York bartender’s book published in 1869, seventeen years after Webster’s death. The anonymous mixographer adds the following introduction:

Well, perhaps. But there were other Webster Punches in circulation, including one whose reputed composition sounds suspiciously like Regent’s Punch. Indeed, for a while there, in the middle of the century, the demand for a glass of Daniel Webster’s Punch seems to have been a common way of playing “stump the bartender.” Could it be that Webster was quite willing to let folks
think
he had a special way of making Punch, without going to all the trouble of actually having one? With that caveat, it must be admitted that this recipe makes just the kind of Punch that Webster, who was not averse to a little luxury in life, would have sipped with genuine enthusiasm.

One bottle of pure old French brandy (smuggled direct preferred), one bottle sherry, one ditto old Jamaica rum, two ditto claret, one ditto Champagne, one dozen lemons, one pint strong tea, sugar, strawberries, and pineapple to suit the taste, plenty of ice, no water.

For the cognac, use the best you can afford. An XO would not be out of place here. The oloroso sherry should be of the medium variety, but not too lush. For the rum, see the notes for Quoit Club Punch on page 244. The wine doesn’t have to be from Bordeaux, but it does have to be dry, red and rich. Nutmeg on top of the finished Punch is a kindness.

One of the three recipes for bowl-sized Punches I included in
Imbibe!
was a version of this
,
formerly Savannah’s favorite way of putting visitors in their place. The 1907 recipe I printed for it, while a good one, came with an acknowledgment that back when the Chatham Artillery first made it, “its vigor . . . was much greater than at present, experience having taught the rising generation to modify the receipt of their forefathers to conform to the weaker constitutions of their progeny.” I always hate to print a weaker recipe when a stronger one exists or, with exceptions, a newer one when there’s an older one.

 

I was therefore very pleased, some weeks after that book was published, to come across a little item in the
Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle
recounting the origins and original composition of this particular piece of ordnance. “Its history is this,” the article explains:

Note that the Republican Blues here are the Savannah ones, not the Richmond ones with the gargantuan bowls of Quoit Club Punch. It must’ve been fun to be in one of those regiments, in peacetime, anyway. The Punch as originally made is utterly devastating. I can vouch for that, having now made it many times. To quote the
Chronicle
, “As a vanquisher of men its equal has never been found.”