Punch (34 page)

To prepare, first stir 2 cups demerara or turbinado sugar in 1 cup water over a low flame until the sugar has dissolved (about five minutes). Let this cool. Then squeeze twelve limes and combine the juice in a large bowl with 12 ounces of the sugar syrup and stir. Add two 750-milliliter bottles of 10 Cane rum—or one bottle of 10 Cane and one 750-milliliter bottle of Hennessy Privilege VSOP cognac—and top off with 2 quarts water or, for a more stimulating concoction, cold black or green tea (use 2½ tablespoons loose tea or eight tea bags). Stir again and refrigerate. Half an hour before serving, add a large block of ice (this can be made by freezing 2 quarts of water in a bowl overnight), taste and adjust for sweetness, if necessary, with the additional syrup. Grate nutmeg over the top. Serves twenty, or ten journalists.

One of the most amusing things with which I have ever been associated is the Plymouth Cocktail Pilgrimage, an institution I cooked up with Simon Ford, then “brand ambassador” (as the drinks industry terms the person who goes around persuading bartenders and their ilk to drink a certain product) for Plymouth gin. Here’s how it works: pick a city where a lot of fancy drinking has historically occurred. Identify its most famous bars, whether they’re still there or not. Find the addresses for the ones that are gone. Figure out the signature Cocktails for each. Rent a bus. Round up fifty or so bartenders, journalists and Cocktail geeks. Drive them around in said bus, stopping only to have the appropriate drink at each location, whether that means standing on the sidewalk on Rodeo Drive across the street from the site of Romanoff’s, strolling down the Strand in London sipping Limmer’s Gin Punch out of a gallon-sized hip flask or getting chased out of Madison Square by the U.S. Park Service for clandestinely sipping Manhattan Cocktails there.

Now, one of the (few) problems with these pilgrimages is that bartenders dry out fast and require constant moistening. Yet while they must be provided with something to drink in between official Cocktails, that something can’t be too alcoholic, and indeed should even be mildly stimulating. Here is our solution: a light, slightly caffeinated Plymouth Gin Punch I stitched together from several recipes found in William Terrington’s 1869 landmark of Victorian mixology,
Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks
. Each pilgrim, when he or she boards the bus, is issued an engraved hip flask full of it. If anyone should finish that flask—well, okay, they’re bartenders. There are refills. Many, many refills.

Prepare an oleo-saccharum with the peel of three lemons and 2 ounces superfine sugar.

Add 1 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice and stir until sugar has dissolved.

Add 4 ounces rich pineapple syrup, 1 ounce yellow Chartreuse and 1 liter Plymouth gin. Stir again.

Add 1 quart weak green tea (three tea bags, infused three minutes in 1 quart hot water and left to cool). When ready to serve, add 1 liter cold seltzer and a large block of ice.

This recipe is for the original version, served in New York in 2007, where we called it the “Gowanus Club Punch” (there is no Gowanus Club, by the way). For every subsequent version, we replaced the yellow Chartreuse with a different liqueur and changed the name. Some others: for Los Angeles, it was the “Al Malaikah Shrine Punch,” and the liqueur was Marie Brizard’s Apry, an apricot brandy (a mainstay of Golden Age Hollywood mixology). For San Francisco, the “Sydney Ducks’ Punch” (named after the Australian convicts who terrorized the city during the Gold Rush); for that, we used green Chartreuse, but we probably should have used Fernet-Branca. For New Orleans, we used Herbsaint, the local absinthe substitute, and called it the “Iberville Club Punch.” Et cetera.

To make rich pineapple syrup, stir 4 cups demerara sugar and 2 cups water over a low flame until all sugar has dissolved, than let cool. Peel, core and dice a pineapple into one-inch cubes, put them in a bowl with the syrup and let sit at room temperature overnight (cover the bowl). Strain out the cubes, bottle the syrup and keep refrigerated.

Another, rather more serious enterprise aimed at bartenders in which I participate is called BarSmarts, during which, under the aegis of the spirits giant Pernod Ricard, I get to travel around the country in the company of booze-business legends Andy Seymour, Paul Pacult, Steve Olson, Doug Frost and Dale DeGroff—my partners in the educational enterprise known as Beverage Alcohol Resource, or BAR—and certify bartenders’ skills at mixing drinks. We roll into town, assemble a hundred or so bartenders, spend a few hours showing them some recent developments in mixology, and then ask them to make drinks for us, one at a time. To stand before Dale DeGroff and stir a Martini is not easy.

At least they get a taste of Punch first. One of those recent developments being Punch service, we like to give a quick lesson in how to do it in your bar. This is what we use as an example. It should be noted that traditionally, Irish Whiskey Punch was not adulterated with wine, even one so mellow and insinuating as a rainwater Madeira. More’s the pity.

Prepare an oleo-saccharum with the peel of three lemons and 6 ounces white sugar. Add 6 ounces strained lemon juice and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Add to this 12 ounces Sandeman Rainwater Madeira, stir and pour the Madeira shrub into a clean 750-milliliter bottle. Add enough water to the bottle to fill it, seal and refrigerate. Fill another clean 750-milliliter bottle with filtered water and refrigerate that, too.

To serve, pour the bottle of shrub, the bottle of water and one 750-milliliter bottle of Jameson 12 or Redbreast Irish whiskey into a gallon Punch bowl, add a 1½ quart block of ice and grate nutmeg over the top.

Not everything has to be so complicated. Case in point. When I was appearing a few years back at the annual Southern Foodways Alliance conference at Oxford, Mississippi, the indispensable and indefatigable John T. Edge, the alliance’s director, came up to me with a small mixological problem. The alliance had been donated a large amount of premixed sweet tea and a not-inconsiderable amount of bourbon. Did I know a tasty, traditional way of mixing them? Of course, the question was just John being polite; he knew full well what to do with both. But I was flattered to be consulted (as he suspected I would be) and came up with a Punch that breaks every single one of my core mixological principles save one, which is perhaps the most important one of them all: drink the best thing you can, given what’s available. If you can get lemons and real tea, of course you’re going to use those. But if it’s a choice between commercial lemonade and iced tea and a campground full of folks stuck with Beam and Coke, why not cheat a little? Flexibility in the pursuit of intoxication is no vice.

Combine in a bucket full of ice: 1½ quarts Newman’s Own Lightly Sweetened Lemonade, 1½ quarts Newman’s Own Iced Tea, 1.5 liters seltzer, 1.75 liters booze (something dark and flavorful; my favorite: 1 liter Jim Beam Black mixed with a 750-milliliter bottle of Wray & Nephew White Overproof rum). For that homemade look, add sliced lemons and grate nutmeg over the top. Ladle away.

Other brands of lemonade and iced tea may be used, but try for the minimum number of ingredients in each. You can sour this Punch with fresh-squeezed lemon juice instead of lemonade (use about 14 ounces and add extra water), but that’s really not what it’s all about. Field conditions, people. If you use fruit-flavored tea, it will be all you can taste. The booze is up to you. Tequila?
Sí
. Bourbon or rye? Yep. Rum? You bet. Gin, vodka or ouzo? Not so much.