The spread of Punch-drinking couldn’t have been hurt by Parliament’s 1678 ban on the importation of French wines. This regulation was as much an attempt to buck up the fledgling wine trade with Portugal as it was a hit at France and its troublesome monarch, Louis XIV, but since the Portuguese, the most temperate of people, barely drank wine themselves and when they did cared little about its quality (it would take generations to create the magnificence that is port), it resulted mostly in more smuggling and spirits-drinking in England. As in turn did the various measures passed under William III—the genever-drinking Dutchman who was given the English throne in 1688 after Charles’s brother James, who succeeded him in 1685, unacceptably produced a Catholic heir—to restrict the very large wine and brandy trade with France, now an open enemy, and bulk up English grain-distilling.
The moment of transition was captured perfectly by the spectacularly alluring figure of Mrs. Aphra Behn—author, spy, courtesan, wit and mixologist (we’ll get to that last part in Book III)—in her play The Widow Ranter, published posthumously in 1690. Set in Virginia, it features in the very first scene a country justice of the peace “sick” from having been drunk the night before on “high Burgundy Claret.” Hearing this, his tippling companion wonders aloud “how the gentlemen do drink” that “Paulter Liquor, your English French wine.” “Ay so do I,” replies our over-hung J.P.:’tis for want of a little Virginia Breeding: how much more like a Gentleman ’tis, to drink as we do, brave Edifying Punch and Brandy,—but they say the young Noble-men now and Sparks in England begin to reform, and take it for their mornings.
Although Mrs. Behn was barred by her sex from participating in the strictly stag coffeehouse culture, she nonetheless maintained a wide acquaintance among the wits (the prologue to The Widow Ranter was supplied by no less than Dryden himself). If drinking Punch was still low enough to satirize, it must have at least been common enough for the jab to tell.aa
By 1690, Punch-drinking had also followed the roads out of London and taken root deep in the countryside. In 1675, when Henry Teonge joined his ship fresh from rural Warwickshire, he had pronounced the Punch of which he shared three bowls on his first night afloat “a Liquor very strange to me.” Ten years later, they had even heard of it in farthest Yorkshire, judging by the fact that George Meriton included it in the locally printed booklet of verses he wrote in praise of Yorkshire ale. Not that rural Punch-tippling didn’t have its problems, as Thomas Brown, one of Dryden’s verbal sparring partners, who found himself marooned in Hertfordshire, complained in a characteristically amusing 1692 letter on the inconveniences of country life:The Wine, in those few Places where we find it, is so intolerably bad, that tho’ ’tis good for nothing else, ’tis a better Argument for Sobriety, than what all the Volumes of Morality can afford. . . . Where this sorry Stuff is not to be had, we are forc’d, in our own Defence, to take up with Punch, but the Ingredients are as long a summoning, as a Colonel would be recruiting his Regiment. . . . We must send to a Market-Town five miles off for Sugar and Nutmeg, and five miles beyond that for rotten Lemons. Water it self is not to be had without travelling a League for it, and an unsanctify’d Kettle supplies the Place of a Bowl. Then when we have mix’d all these noble Ingredients, which, generally speaking, are as bad as those the Witches in Mackbeth jumble together to make a Charm, we fall to contentedly, and sport off an Afternoon. ’Tis true, our Heads suffer for it next Morning, but what is that to an old Soldier? We air our selves next Morning on the Common, and the Sin and the Pain are forgotten together.
Reluctantly or not, the tavern class had learned to drink Punch, and it would take it another century and a half to relinquish the sport and the sin and the pain of it.
Thus arrived the Age of Punch. In 1700, Ned Ward could opine in prose that Punch “if composed of good ingredients, and prepared with true judgment, exceeds all the simple [i.e., straight, unmixed], potable products in the universe” and in verse that “Had our forefathers but thy virtues known, / Their foggy ale to lubbers they’d have thrown.” As long as there were lubbers—that is, bumpkins—to keep ale alive, its triumph was not complete, but Punch did cast many of the other traditional compound drinks of Olde Englande, those turbid, egg-rich brews based on ale and wine, into the outer darkness, where is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Over time, the informal associations that the coffeehouses encouraged hardened into formal clubs made up of like-minded men who agreed to meet at a fixed time and venue and follow certain loose rules. Not all clubs drank Punch, but most did, and since the majority of them favored the Whigs—the (semi) progressive element in English politics and the one that supported William III against his Tory and Jacobite (i.e., loyal to the deposed James II) opponents—Punch became something of a Whig drink. In 1695, when William III visited Warwick Castle, “a cistern containing a hundred and twenty gallons of punch was emptied to his Majesty’s health,” as one contemporary history recorded. Clearly, in a time when Whiggishness was triumphant that association did nothing to impair Punch’s popularity. If the Tories, not at all progressive, stuck for a time to the traditional French wines of the English gentry, paying exorbitantly for smuggled goods when necessary, eventually they, too, would yield to the attraction of the “flowing bowl” (a phrase that was already proverbial when Matthew Prior used it in one of his poems in 1718).
Ultimately, people will drink what they will drink, politics be damned. Ned Ward, for one, was a Tory, and when he tired of Grub Street, he opened a Punch house of his own. But even if you agreed with Bishop Hoadley’s then-notorious polemic on the theme “Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world” and eschewed the vulgar money-getting and party politics of the day in favor of laying up capital for the next world, you could still partake. Henry Fielding’s prison chaplain in The Adventures of Jonathan Wild supplies the justification: “If we must drink, let us have a Bowl of Punch—a Liquor I rather prefer, as it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture.”
Many Punch-drinkers absorbed their portions without incident. But as Fielding also observed, this time in Tom Jones, “There are indeed certain Liquors, which, being applied to our Passions, or to Fire, produce Effects the very Reverse of those produced by Water, as they serve to kindle and inflame, rather than to extinguish. Among these, the generous Liquor called Punch is one.” Just because clubmen were literate and of at least a middling social rank didn’t mean that they wouldn’t sluice themselves a little too liberally from the bowl and end the evening in a crashing, heaving general brawl. With Punch on the table, even someone as civilized as Samuel Taylor Coleridge can end up smashing glassware, windows and furnishings, as he and Theodore Hook and their fellow topers did on one late evening at “a gay young bachelor’s villa near Highgate” (Coleridge brewed the Punch, so Lord knows what was in it).
But that only fit in with the times. In the early eighteenth century, London was nothing like the trim, orderly place it (mostly) is today, with its neat ranks of just-so town houses, its quiet, leafy parks and its general air of peaceful bustle. The streets in the older parts of town were dark and narrow and choked with (as Jonathan Swift put it) “filths of all hues and odour,” while not even the most fashionable new neighborhoods were exempt from having herds of swine driven through them to market. Londoners were different, too. The lords and marquesses and other fine gentlemen didn’t carry umbrellas but carried swords, and not just for show, while the common people weren’t so much plucky and quaint as frankly terrifying—a xenophobic, violent lot who made a sport of pelting anyone who ventured into the street in fancy court-dress with some of those “filths” and could turn from curious crowd to murderous mob at the drop of a handkerchief.
They did not drink Punch. They drank gin, and far too much of it. As much as their putative betters deplored the gin habit, though, they weren’t all that much better when it came to resisting the power of aqua vitae. When, in the 1730s, Parliament began to consider various prohibition measures, there were always members who could be counted on to
mount passionate arguments for the exemption of Punch and its component spirits (i.e., anything but gin) from the law. In 1737, when Parliament passed the infamous Gin Act, with no exceptions, one of the first acts of protest came from the Cherry Tree Tavern in Clerkenwell (by then, taverns had followed the coffeehouses’ lead in serving Punch), where “a Company of 100 Persons resolving to drink Punch . . . had a Bowl (or rather Trough) of that liquor . . . containing 80 Gallons, which was drunk out before the Company parted.”ab Reading through the Old Bailey’s records of the rapes, robberies, assaults and outright murders committed under the influence of Punch, one may conclude that at times the main difference between the filth-pelter and the peltee was the price of their tipple (those sword-carrying gentlemen, for example, had a distressing habit of getting quarrelsome over Punch and sticking each other, all too often fatally).
Punch was not cheap. Once it became a status drink, the literate classes made it an object of connoisseurship, in particular the spirits that fueled it. By the late seventeenth century, the days of generic aqua vitae were over. Now drinkers had preferences. If it wasn’t arrack, imported at great expense from the East,ac it was French brandy, by now (at its best, anyway) an exceedingly well-distilled, barrel-mellowed commodity, or fragrant rum from the Caribbean. For a bowl of Punch made with one of these, one might expect to pay six or eight shillings a three-quart bowl. Eight shillings doesn’t sound like much, but in an age when, as a friend of Samuel Johnson observed to him, “thirty pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live [in London] and not be contemptible,” it amounted to half a week’s living wage—say, some two hundred dollars today. The lemons alone cost the equivalent of eight dollars each. Sure, you would split this bowl between three or four people, but it still required a rather hefty capital investment. By the 1730s, the gin-drinkers had learned to make Punch with it, which could be sold for a shilling—say, twenty-five dollars a bowl. Entirely more like it. With the creation of Gin Punch, this simple sailor’s expedient completed its conquest: all levels of English—or rather British, as it had to be called since the 1707 union of England and Scotland—society were more or less comfortable with the idea that spirits could be drunk recreationally.
More or less. There would always be some who eyed Punch with suspicion. In 1727, Daniel Defoe could still sniff about “The Punch Drinkers of Quality (if any such there be).” But he was an old-timer, born just before the Restoration, and didn’t quite get what was going on. People of “Quality” most assuredly drank Punch; they just didn’t really respect it. Not even in the colonies: in 1739, Charles Francis wrote a friend in England from Jamaica that “The common Drink here is Madeira wine, or Rum Punch; the first, mixed with Water, is used by the better Sort; the latter, by Servants and the inferior kind of People.” Now, it’s safe to say that either he wasn’t being strictly truthful or his Jamaican acquaintances were on their best behavior while the man from the home office was sniffing around. Jamaica was as punchy as a place could be. But it’s true that even in its heyday, Punch could never quite rid itself of the whiff of the lower decks it carried with it. A gentleman or a lady could always drink French claret—even the brandy-jolted, adulterated stuff that passed under the namead—without giving even the severest critic grounds to so much as raise an eyebrow. But Punch, even at its most carefully compounded and wholesome, remained something of a spree drink, fuel for a devil-take-the-hindmost journey to the end of the night.
In the colonies, that didn’t matter so much, since by definition no colonial was truly of the best sort. As a result, Punch, and particularly Rum Punch, was consumed by almost every rung on the social ladder. When a group of African slaves plotted with a white alehouse-keeper to burn New York and slaughter its inhabitants—the abortive uprising that would be known as the New York Conspiracy of 1741—it was over Rum Punch that they conspired. Three years later, when Dr. Alexander Hamilton of Maryland took a trip to Maine and back for his health, he found his fellow colonials sluicing themselves with the stuff pretty liberally, in just about every town he visited. And if from time to time he joined them in a bowl, what of it? It was simply the sociable thing to do, as George Washington had to learn the hard way. In 1757, when the twenty-five-year-old major stood for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses, he was known as an unsociable fellow who had frequently wrangled with the local “Tippling-house keepers” over their selling drinks to his soldiers. To prove his uncongeniality, he stood on principle and declined to provide the customary free drinks at his campaign rallies. He lost. The next year, he spent thirty-six pounds and change on liquors, almost half of it on Punch. He won.
After independence for a time, free men continued to club together to while away their idle hours around a bowl of Punch, just as they had when they were subjects of the king. In November 1783, when the Continental Army reoccupied New York, there was a general carouse of several days’ duration. As part of it, George Clinton, the governor of New York State, held a banquet for the French ambassador at which the 120 guests emptied 30 bowls of (presumably Rum) Punch—and 135 bottles of Madeira, 36 bottles of port and 60 bottles of English beer. Or then there’s the celebration held for the ordination of a New England minister in 1785, at which the eighty people present put paid to “30 Boles of Punch before the People went to meeting” and “44 boles of Punch while at dinner,” not to mention 28 bottles of wine, 8 bowls of brandy and an unspecified quantity of “cherry rum.” As the new republic found its legs, though, the old institution began to seem a little quaint.
By then, though, Punch was beginning to fade even in the land that first fostered it. We can see the beginning of the end in India in a letter the India Gazette published in 1781 from “An Old Country Captain.” “I am an old stager in this Country,” he writes,having arrived in Calcutta in the year 1736. . . . Those were the days, when Gentlemen studied Ease instead of Fashion; even when the Hon. Members of the Council met in Banyan Shirts, Long Drawers and Conjee Caps; with a case bottle of good old Arrack, and a Gouglet of Water placed on the Table, which the Secretary (a Skilful Hand) frequently converted into Punch. . . .
Note the nostalgic mode (and that wonderful word “gouglet”). The very fact that he had to write in to mention all this indicates that business was no longer conducted on these lines. By 1810, Thomas Williamson could write about Punch, in his East India Guide and Vade-Mecum , that “that beverage is now completely obsolete, unless among sea-faring persons, who rarely fail to experience its deleterious effects.” How low the mighty have fallen! Things were no better in America, long a bastion of Punch-drinking. By 1810, Americans were no longer colonists, and they were rapidly pursuing their own mixological path, without so much as a glance over their shoulder at their traditional drinkways.
Even in England, life was changing. The ritual of the Punch bowl had been a secular communion, welding a group of good fellows together into a temporary sodality whose values superseded all others—or, in plain English, a group of men gathered around a bowl of Punch could be pretty much counted on to see it to the end, come what may. All in good fun, and something the modern world could perhaps use a little more of, but it required its participants to have a large block of uncommitted time on their hands. As the nineteenth century wore on, this was less and less likely to be the case. Industrialization and improved communications and the rise of the bourgeoisie all made claims on the individual that militated against partaking of the Lethean bowl. Not that the Victorians were exactly sober, by our standards, but neither could they be as wet as their forefathers. As Robert Chambers put it in 1864, “Advanced ideas on the question of temperance have, doubtless, . . . had their influence in rendering obsolete, in a great measure, this beverage.”
This isn’t the only reason Punch fell by the wayside, of course. Improvements in distilling and, above all, aging of liquors meant that they required less intervention to make them palatable. The rise of a global economy made for greater choice of potables and a more fragmented culture of drink. Centr
al heating to some degree dimmed the charms of hot Punch. Ideas of democracy and individualism extended to men’s behavior in the barroom, where they were less likely to all settle for the same thing or let someone else choose what they were to drink. Like all social institutions, the bowl of Punch was subject to a plethora of subtle and incremental strains. Eventually, by midcentury, they toppled it, with most of the pull coming from America. Punch was out and the Cocktail, the down-the-hatch, out-the-door-and-back-to-work drink par excellence, was in. The flowing bowl would serve out the rest of its days in the twilight land of the special-occasion, holiday-gathering drink.
BOOK II
A CONCISE BUT COMPREHENSIVE COURSE IN THE ART OF MAKING PUNCH
Unless you’re a total mixology geek, I strongly suggest you skip this entire section of the book and proceed to Book III, “The Punches.” If you actually start making any of those, you can always come back here for tips, pointers and reasons why. Until then, off you go.
V
THE REASON WHY
There’s something about Punch that demands generalities and grand schemes. I suppose it has to do with the not-inconsiderable investment each bowl requires in time and, some would argue more importantly, money. By contrast, a Cocktail can be lashed together from whatever’s at hand. Tequila, kumquat juice and clover honey? Give it a spin. Tawny port, Cherry Heering, Holland gin and half-and-half? Why the hell not? If it proves unsatisfactory (as I suspect that last one might), down the drain it goes and no regrets. You’re only out a couple of ounces of booze and the thirty seconds or so it takes to shake them up. But when it’s a question of twenty minutes of squeezing lemons, a quart and a half—eighty dollars’ worth, give or take, at New York prices—of pretty good cognac, and the hopes and dreams of the thirty people who shall soon be ringing your door-bell, that’s an entirely different story. Punch matters. Punch has heft. As one nineteenth-century master put it, “a man can never make good punch unless he is satisfied, nay positive, that no man breathing can make better.” That satisfaction comes from experience, to be sure. But it also comes from knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing; from, in short, a theory.
Punch Page 7