Punch
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
BOOK I - THE HISTORY OF PUNCH
I - AQUA VITAE, AQUA MORTIS
II - “A HORSE THAT DRINKS OF ALL WATERS”
III - “PUNCH BY NO ALLOWANC”
IV - THE AGE OF PUNCH
BOOK II - A CONCISE BUT COMPREHENSIVE COURSE IN THE ART OF MAKING PUNCH
V - THE REASON WHY
VI - INGREDIENTS
VII - TOOLS
VIII - HOW TO MAKE PUNCH, OR THE FOUR PILLARS OF PUNCH
BOOK III - THE PUNCHES
IX - ARRACK PUNCH, ALIAS RACK PUNCH
X - BRANDY PUNCH, RUM PUNCH, AND BRANDY AND RUM PUNCH
XI - PUNCH ROYAL
XII - MILK PUNCH
XIII - ORANGE PUNCH
XIV - WHISKEY PUNCH
XV - GIN PUNCH
XVI - OXFORD PUNCH
XVII - REGENCY PUNCH
XVIII - AMERICAN FANCY PUNCH
EPILOGUE
PERORATION
A BRIEF NOTE ON FURTHER READING
SOURCES FOR RARE INGREDIENTS AND TOOLS
APPENDIX - ORIGINAL TEXTS OF TRANSLATED RECIPES
Acknowledgements
INDEX
A PERIGEE BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
PERIGEE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “P” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wondrich, David.
Punch : the delights (and dangers) of the flowing bowl : an anecdotal history of the original monarch
of mixed drinks, with more than forty historic recipes, fully annotated, and a complete course in the lost
art of compounding punch / David Wondrich.
p. cm.
“A Perigee Book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-44512-9
1. Punches (Beverages) 2. Cocktails. 3. Fruit drinks. I. Title.
TX951.W57 2010
641.8’74—dc22 2010030835
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Spence,
who would have dug it
The Age of Punch as seen by its grandsons
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
INVOCATION
In the Age of Chaos, long before the creation of the Cocktail, Spirituous and Aqueous, Thick and Thin, Sweet and Sharp and Unctuous were all tumbled together in One Undifferentiated Mass without Form or Order. Then from the East there rose a Sun to dry the Wet and distill the Light from the Heavy. And then all Drinks began to know their Proper Kinds and submit the Willfulness of their Doing to the Correction of Just Reason. That Sun had a Name, and that Name was Punch.
PREFACE
This book is about Punch. And by “Punch,” I don’t mean the stuff sluiced around at fraternity mixers—several 1.75-liter handles of whatever hooch is the cheapest, diluted with a random array of sodas and ersatz juices and ladled elegantly forth from a plastic trash can. Nor do I mean the creative concoctions proffered by feature articles on stylish entertaining—light, colorful things that are all fizz and fruit and are far too eager to please to be taken seriously as a delivery system for beverage alcohol.a
In short, there are lots of “punches” this book isn’t about. But you wouldn’t expect a serious book on the Martini (such things do exist) to waste a lot of time on the so-called Chocolate Martini or, in fact, on anything not containing gin, vermouth and practically nothing else that tries to pass itself off as a Martini—to say nothing of the “x-tini,” where x ≠ “Mar.” And this is a serious book about Punch—well, as serious as a book can be that tells the story of a means of communal inebriation and its associated traditions, supported by a slew of sometimes rather fiddly formulae for re-creating drinks that haven’t been tasted by humankind in at least a century and a half. In any case, it’s the first of its kind, and as such, it’s going to discriminate.
The fact that nobody’s published a real book about Punch before is in and of itself a remarkable thing. Open just about any volume written in English between the late 1600s and the mid 1800s that deals with the details of day-to-day life and odds are sooner or later somebody’s going to brew up a bowl of the stuff—Behn, Defoe, Addison and Steele, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sheridan, Boswell, Burney, Edgeworth, Austen, Coleridge, Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, world without end. The rakes of the Restoration knew it, William and Mary’s subjects drank it readily, the reigns of the three Georges were damp with it—very damp—and the Regency was well steeped indeed. George Washington enjoyed it, and Thomas Jefferson owed a part of his property to it. For some two hundred years, Punch—at base a simple combination of distilled spirits, citrus juice, sugar, water and a little spice—was the reigning monarch of the kingdom of mixed drinks. If nothing else, it has stories to tell.
Most of Punch’s stories are of warm fellowship and conviviality and high-spirited gatherings afloat on oceans of witty talk. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that there aren’t also plenty of battles and brawls and all the other products of the temporary madness that overtakes even the strongest-headed when they’ve consumed more distilled spirits than they can keep track of. For every cozy evening like the ones the settled Sussex townsman and diarist Thomas Turner used to spend, back in the days of George III, drinking Punch made from smuggled French brandy with his fellow tradesmen, there was one like Captain Drake’s in early 1
709, when he sat up guzzling Arrack Punch with three fashionable whores in his cell in London’s Newgate Prison, where he was being held for treason under arms. “On a sudden some difference arose between the ladies,” he later recalled, causing them to engage in “bloodshed and battery” until they were exhausted and their clothes and coiffures in tatters—at which point they patched themselves up as best they could, rearranged their hair, and called for another bowl.
But sufficient as it may be, the chance to retail a few drams of damp anecdotes is far from the only reason to write a book about Punch. Recent years have seen public interest in the fine art of mixing drinks fizz up to an almost alarming level, spawning a number of surprisingly sober books on the subject—books that focus almost obsessively on the craft and history of the Cocktail. (I myself have written three.) Almost without exception, these books have focused on the American part of the story—the part that begins with the Sling, the Cocktail, the Mint Julep and all the other ancestral “American sensations,” progenitors of pretty much every mixed drink we lap up today save Vodka and Red Bull, and you could even squeeze that one in among the Slings if you were to rub it with a little Vaseline first.
We don’t know who first came up with the Julep or the Cocktail or indeed almost any of the foundational American drinks. But somebody had to teach those anonymous folk geniuses how to mix drinks. Mixology might be simple enough, as far as crafts go, but it still has its secrets, its right ways and wrong ways, its tricks and traditions. Indeed, by 1806, when the Cocktail was first defined in print, concerned men and women had been grappling for two centuries and more with all the issues of balance, potency and proper service that mixing drinks with distilled spirits raises. Admittedly, in the larger scheme of things, these are pretty trivial—unless, that is, you’ve just laid down good coin for a drink, coin that was earned by the sweat of your brow (or whatever other part of your body you sweat with). In that case, it has real meaning whether the drink you’re about to taste was assembled by a ham-handed ignoramus who’s making it up as he goes along or by someone who has spent a few years absorbing the best practices of the job from people who really know their onions.
In the early days of the American republic, when this quintessentially American art was first finding its legs, the best practices with which the wide-awake young men behind the bar had been indoctrinated were British, developed across the Atlantic and transplanted in American soil, and the laboratory in which they had been developed was the Punch bowl. We don’t know precisely who invented Punch in the first place, nor are we ever likely to. But we don’t know who invented the Martini, either, or the original Cocktail. Such is the history of mixed drinks. We do know that if Punch wasn’t the first mixed drink powered by distilled spirits, it was certainly the first globally popular one—spirits-drinking’s killer app, as it were—and that its first unambiguous appearance in writing was in a letter by an Englishman. Whoever might have invented it, it was Englishmen, or at least Britons, who fostered the formula, spread it to their neighbors, took it all around the world.
Although when I say “Englishmen,” I am doing a great injustice, as much if not most of the mixing of drinks that was done in England in the eighteenth century was not done by men at all. Bartending was a woman’s job. That’s not to say that no men ever performed it, but the standard setup was the man as proprietor, host, bouncer and business manager, while the ones who drew the drinks and served them were female—in fact, they were often the proprietor’s daughters, the prettier the better. As Thomas Brown observed in 1700, “Every Coffee-House is illuminated both without and within Doors; without by a fine Glass Lanthorn, and within by a Woman . . . light and splendid,” whose job was not only to serve the customer but to chaff him and flirt with him and draw him in. I suspect that the freedom the modern bartender possesses to banter with a customer, a thing not common in the service professions, was fought for and won by those Punch-slinging young barmaids of three hundred years ago.
“The Pretty Bar Maid,” Thomas Rowlandson, 1795
BRITISH MUSEUM
Like all the best and most enduring culinary preparations, Punch was a simple formula that could grow in complexity with its executor’s skill and available resources. During the two centuries of its hegemony, British Punch-makers, generously endowed with both, used them to develop a good many of what we consider today to be the hallmarks of the American school of mixing drinks. The appreciation of which liquors and wines complement each other and which don’t; the ins and outs of balancing sweet and sour; the use of liqueurs and various flavored syrups for sweetening; the salutary effects of Champagne and sparkling water on drink and drinker; the affinities between certain citrus fruits and certain spirits (e.g., the orange and brandy, the lime and rum); the use of eggs, dairy products and gelatin as smoothing agents—the list is both long and technical, descending into the minutiae of proportion, technique and even garnish.
The chance to explore the British foundations of modern mixology and, even better, to delve into the rich and mostly unmined quarry of anecdote that stemmed from it is certainly motivation enough to write a book and, I hope, for people to read it. Yet there’s another, even better reason, but to explain it I’m going to have to stoop to autobiography.
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INTOXICATE PEOPLE
Ten years ago, I fell into a job writing about Cocktails. It began as an amusing sideline, something to have a little fun with while I pursued a career as professor of English literature. But it turned out that mixing up Sazerac Cocktails and Green Swizzles, researching their histories and writing anecdotal little essays about them for Esquire magazine’s website was not only more fun than grading papers and trying to keep classes full of hormone-buzzed sophomores focused on the tribulations of King Lear but also—to me, anyway—considerably more satisfying. Perhaps I lacked academic seriousness. In any case, before very long the sideline metastasized into a career.
Being a professional Cocktail geek brought its own peculiar challenges. One of them was what to do at parties. Spending all this time in the company of delightful drinks, I wanted to share—friends don’t let friends drink Vodka Tonics, not when they could be absorbing iced dewdrops crafted from good gin or straight rye whiskey, fresh-squeezed juices, rare bitters and liqueurs and, of course, lots of love. But bartending is hard work, and after a couple of years’ worth of parties spent measuring, shaking, stirring, spilling, fumbling for ingredients, fielding requests for Vodka Tonics and, worst of all, never getting a chance to actually talk to anyone, I was willing to relinquish the spotlight and the performative glory of mixing drinks in front of people for a little hanging out and cocktail party chitchat. Perhaps it was time to take a second look at Punch. After all, the old bartender’s guides I’d been steadily accumulating had clutches of large-bore recipes tucked away at the back, and if these were anywhere near as tasty as the Cocktails I’d been successfully extracting from them . . .
My first attempts to fill the Punch bowl, however, were amateur at best. I treated the recipes as mere guidelines, changing things for convenience and cost and because surely I knew better than the mustachioed old gent whose work I was interpreting. Used to making Cocktails, where dilution is a no-no, I would cut back the seemingly excessive amounts of water the recipes called for. The result, of course, was chaos. I remember, dimly, one summer afternoon when I made the famous Philadelphia Fish-House Punch for the first time, leaving in the copious amounts of rum and brandy but omitting most of the water. Fortunately, it was at a house party out in the country, and nobody had to drive. Or even walk, for that matter. Even staying pantsed was somewhat of a challenge. Other times, I’d skimp on the ice, think nothing of using powdered nutmeg instead of grating it fresh, splash in Technicolor arrays of clashing liqueurs, substitute cheap bourbon for good cognac or ginger ale for Champagne and a host of other things too embarrassing to relate.
Eventually, though, I began to learn. I had help. Friends shared their expertise, their space, t
heir liquor and, most importantly, themselves. It’s not Punch if there’s nobody to drink it. Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, who had put in some sterling work at the Punch bowl, was happy to share the fruits of his experience (for the record, his Bimbo Punch is a thing of beauty). Sherwin Dunner, friend to every living hot jazz musician, hosted some memorable evenings, where the Punch flowed like ditchwater and the music reached an authentic speakeasy-era level of abandon. Nick Noyes and Jessica Monaco provided guinea pigs in their dozens and in their hundreds and the booze with which to water them—and, even better, an appreciation for precisely the sort of recherché, historic formula that appealed to me. There’s something stirring about gazing across a sweeping lawn full of people all mildly intoxicated on Captain Radcliffe’s Punch, a recipe that hadn’t seen the light of day since England was ruled by a Dutchman. I could go on, but I’ll save everyone else—as many as I can remember—for the acknowledgments.
It wasn’t just laziness that kept me making Punch, although Lord knows I can be plenty lazy. But if you’re spending the hour and a half before party time assembling a baroque concoction that was originally created for European royalty and calls for fifteen ingredients, half of them prepared from other ingredients, sloth doesn’t really enter into it. Nor was it the utter deliciousness of most of these old Punches. G&Ts are delicious, too, and they take a lot less work. But over the last seven or eight years, I’ve made historic Punches dozens and dozens of times, for groups as small as four and as large as 250; for friends coming over to chat, backyard barbecues, Christmas parties, book parties, weddings (a massive bowl of Punch makes a fine wedding present and produces happy wedding guests); for Victorian Societies and museums and clubs and too many lectures to count. Every time, it happens the same way.