WATER AND ICE
Finally, the “element,” as it was known. H2O. Variations and sophistications such as the use of Champagne or soda water will be discussed in the appropriate places in Book III. Ice, however, needs a little attention. Punch, lacking the alcoholic concentration of the Cocktail, does not need to be as numbingly cold—indeed, it is best if it isn’t: if it’s chilled to Cocktail temperatures (i.e., below 32 degrees Fahrenheit), its fragrance is muted and its delicate harmony lost. It does, nonetheless, like to be cool, and in the summer, very cool. Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, iced Punch was considered a luxury indeed. Back then, the ice that provided the cooling had to be cut in the winter from frozen ponds and streams in large blocks and stored in insulated icehouses. That meant that Punch-makers could cut their ice to fit the bowl. The larger the block, the slower it would melt and dilute the Punch. Many preferred to avoid the dilution issue entirely by premixing the Punch, bottling it and keeping the bottles on ice, serving the Punch in small, frequently refilled bowls. Others refrigerated the bowl, either by sinking it in a very large block of ice or by putting it in a much bigger bowl and filling the space in between with cracked ice and salt. In either case, the bowl that held the Punch had to be of silver or some other, baser metal. The final option was to make the Punch extra strong and pour it over a bowl full of cracked ice. That was the American way of the nineteenth century, but then again we had already learned to tolerate ice in our drinks.
When I’m making Punch, if it’s going to be ladled out over the course of an afternoon or evening, I’ll use a large block of ice. This method has the advantage of ensuring that the Punch is weaker as the session progresses—not a bad thing. If it’s all going to be ladled out at once, I’ll go American and fill the bowl with ice cubes. It’ll cool much faster and the punch will be gone before too much of the ice has melted.
To make a block of ice, you’ll need a container half the capacity of your Punch bowl. Fill it with water and freeze it (for the larger quantities, this might take as long as forty-eight hours). Some people obsess about getting the block of ice to look just right, even going so far as to fill it with flowers, slices of fruit, and so on. I do not.
VII
TOOLS
In my last book, Imbibe!, the section on tools took up a good twelve pages. American-style Cocktail-making being a craft that its first appreciators thought was best left to professionals, it required a professional tool kit. Punch-making, though, while often practiced by professionals, was an essentially amateur art, and its traditional tools are accordingly few and simple. Notes & Queries covered most of them in 1885:There were certain articles which usually accompanied the bowl when the drink was made in the room, viz., a small gill measure to adjust the proportions of the ingredients; a peculiar strainer for the lemon juice in the form of a cup or small bowl, with two long flat handles or ears to rest on the side of the jug or vessel in which the mixture was made before it was poured into the bowl; and also the ladle with which the glasses were filled from the bowl.
This last usually took the form of a slender and graceful turned ebony or whalebone handle attached to the side of a smallish oval bowl, always of silver and usually with a silver shilling set into the bottom. Add a knife and a little silver nutmeg box, with a grater for a lid, and you were done, although there were those who would have thrown in a mechanical juicer rather than squeeze the fruit by hand. Napoleon’s empress Josephine (a native of Martinique, deep in the Punch-belt) had a monogrammed one in silver. Nice.
I suppose the bowl could use a little elucidation, and we might as well take a quick look at the glasses while we’re at it. England had a long tradition of mixing ale or wine with this and that and passing it around in bowls, so the line between a Posset bowl and a Punch bowl is rather a hazy one. But we know that “punchbowl” is first attested to in 1658 and that the drink was reputable enough by 1680 for those bowls to start appearing in silver.aj Less exalted topers drank from earthenware and even wood. The large silver Punch bowl became a prime piece of institutional hardware, and every regiment, city corporation, guild, club and whatever else that very associative age could offer in the way of social organization had one: a capacious, footed silver hemisphere, with elaborate, cast handles on the sides and as much engraving as it could hold. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain’s growing East Asia trade also supplied the booming market in Punch bowls with all the genuine china it could use. There were domestic versions, as well, often painted with political, patriotic or satirical themes (amusingly enough, Hogarth’s squalid Midnight Modern Conversation, the print that you will find on the cover of this volume, was a popular motif).
Punch bowls came in all sizes, from the covered “sneaker” or “tiff ” that held no more than a cup to the mammoth five-gallon Alderman’s special. The default size, however, seems to have held a quart, with double and “thribble” bowls holding the requisite amounts (one must bear in mind that Punch was rarely served with ice in it, so a quart bowl of it, even if it was only one-third liquor, would still have room for a good twelve ounces of high-proof rum (the equivalent of more than a pint of 80-proof stuff). More than enough to get two people quite squiffy.
Hogarth’s Punch Bowl. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
In the early nineteenth century, serious Punch-makers began turning to large earthenware jugs for day-to-day use. They didn’t look like much, but they held enough for a small gathering, were easy to pour from, and did a better job of keeping hot punch hot and iced punch cold.
As for glasses, since the smaller bowls of Punch were generally passed around to be sipped from, they were not always necessary. Once the bowl reached a certain size, of course, that was no longer practical. I used to heap scorn upon the little “knuckletrap” cups that come with Punch sets. That was because they’re ugly and tiny. I still do, but only because of the ugly. The Georgian silver Punch ladle in my possession, you see, holds but two ounces, just enough to fill one of the slender, stemmed V-shaped glasses from which the eighteenth century tended to drink its Punch and its wine. Not everyone agreed—there were half-pint “rummers” aplenty, and “bumpers,” which technically meant any glass filled up to surface tension (hence the “bump”) but in practice carried a certain notion of size, so that one might be embarrassed to identify anything less than a gill-sized glass—four ounces—as such. But in general, the glasses were not large.
That’s as it should be, as I’ve learned. Half the fun of a bowl of Punch is in the ritual of it; in the ladling and interacting at the bowl, in the number of glasses drained, in the toasting, and so on. More small servings trump fewer large ones on all counts. One of my prized possessions is the box of thirty-six V-shaped two-ounce Libbey sherry glasses given to me by John Gertsen, of Drink in Boston. Every time it comes out, it’s a party.
I’ve used those glasses with several different bowls. Unfortunately, not a one is a silver heirloom chased with the family crest and so large that it doubled as a baptismal font for ten generations of Wondriches. You don’t have one of those, either? Pity. But here’s the thing: I’ve made Punch successfully in silver bowls, ones of fine china and of expensive cut glass. I’ve also made it successfully in pasta pots, Le Creuset Dutch ovens, plastic bowls, melamine bowls, tin buckets, spackle buckets, salad spinners, highway-crew coolers (you know, the big round orange thing with the cup dispenser on the side and the spigot at the bottom), milk jugs (just cut a hole between the handle and the spout to fit the ice in), five-gallon water-cooler jugs, candy dishes, candy jars, Lexans of all sizes, nameless orange plastic things from Home Depot, large earthenware flower-pots, galvanized washtubs and a host of other miscellaneous vessels I’m not recalling. I have not made it in a washing machine, but I know someone who has. I have not made it in a building—yes, a building—but I know someone who has. A nice bowl is a luxury, not an essential.
These days, for small gatherings I use a ten-inch (diameter) Chinese soup bowl that holds three quarts—
so technically a threbble, although I’m using ice so less liquid is involved. It cost less than ten dollars in a Chinese-restaurant supply house (a set of matching three-ounce teacups cost a dollar each). For medium parties (say, fifteen to twenty people), I find a six-quart china mixing/serving bowl works well; if you can locate one, the “Great Bowl” in the china-maker Pfaltzgraff’s Aura line is just right. For large parties, I’ll either use a fourteen-quart glass bowl, bought new, or, for less formal occasions, deploy the highway-crew cooler (it’s insulated and holds five gallons; most efficient).
For hot Punch, a large earthenware pitcher or jug is traditional, although a fondue kit or—best of all—a Crock-Pot provides an effective modern update. About the largest size of jug available easily these days is three quarts, which is still enough for a pretty-good-sized hot Punch party. Le Creuset makes one; look for the “Sangria Jug.”
The rest of a good modern Punch kit is simple. The one expensive item is a serious juicer. Punch can be a great annoyance to make in quantity if you skimp in this department. There’s no finer or faster juicer made than the large, cast-aluminum Ra Chand J210, which you can get for a little over a hundred dollars. A lever-action, all-manual device, it’s light and fast, and with it you can make a quart of juice in less than ten minutes—as quick as any electric juicer, and it doesn’t chew up the pith (just don’t put it in the dishwasher, or it will corrode). Make Punch four times and it has paid for itself in saved labor. Most of the rest of the gear is self-explanatory: measuring cups, storage containers, a good swivel-bladed vegetable peeler and a large muddler for handling the citrus peels, a chinois for straining the juice, knives and cutting boards. If you’re making Punch to bottle and keep, you’ll also need a fine sieve or strainer. The cloth kind made for straining cooking oil so that it can be used for biodiesel works well and is easily available for cheap on the Internet, but you can also use a clean pillowcase or T-shirt. Oh, and don’t forget the nutmeg grater.
VIII
HOW TO MAKE PUNCH, OR THE FOUR PILLARS OF PUNCH
If Punch-makers were short on theoretical analysis, they were long indeed on practical tips—particularly toward the end of the Punch Age, when one begins to see magazine articles with titles like “The Poetry of Punch” and whole chapters of books devoted to the topic, such as the extensive one Charles Tovey included in his 1878 Wit, Wisdom, and Morals Distilled from Bacchus. By then, of course, the drink had become elaborate enough for the occasional practitioner to require such aids, and most practitioners had become occasional. Many of these tips involved specific modifications of the basic five-ingredient formula; if useful, they will be dealt with in the appropriate chapters of Book III. But there were some definite refinements to the basic technique that kept coming up again and again, albeit not always with perfect agreement. These cover four main areas of Punch-making: the handling of the citrus oil, the handling of the citrus juice, the order of assembly and the proportions of the ingredients.
You will note that none of them has anything to do with garnishing. In 1817, the opinionated Dr. Kitchiner observed in his Apicius Redivivus that “a few parings of the orange or lemon rind are generally considered as having an agreeable appearance floating in the bowl” (and indeed a curl of peel is visible peeking over the edge of the whopping bowl on the cover of this volume). Beyond that (and even that was controversial), classic Punches were essentially unadorned, the frippery and fanciness with which Punch is so often presented being a development of its years of obsolescence, when it was forced to rely on cosmetics and flashy clothing to seduce wary drinkers, rather than the healthy, native charms of youth. If you require such a presentation, your imagination can no doubt be your guide.
PILLAR I: THE OLEO-SACCHARUM. As Jerry Thomas wrote, “to make punch of any sort in perfection, the ambrosial essence of the lemon must be extracted.” By “ambrosial essence,” he meant not the juice but the oil contained in the fruit’s skin. In this, he was entirely correct: the lemon oil adds a fragrance and depth that marks the difference between a good Punch and a great one (the same applies to Punch made with oranges, in particular Seville ones; if you’re making Lime Punch, however, you’re off the hook—lime peel is unacceptably bitter and its oil never used in classic recipes). By far the best and easiest way to incorporate this oil in Punch is to extract it with sugar, it having long been recognized that, as the Dispensatory of the United States of America put it in 1858, “Sugar renders . . . fixed and volatile oils to a certain extent miscible with water and forms with the latter [a] . . . combination called in pharmacy oleo-saccharum.” I don’t know when this oleo-saccharum (dog Latin for “oil-sugar”) first began to be incorporated in Punch recipes, but it seems to have been on the table, so to speak, by 1670, when it appears in a very Punch-like recipe by Hannah Wooley. It was most certainly in play by 1707, when our old friend Ned Ward writes of a “Ladies Punch-Club, near St. James’s,” and the member of it who shares secret nips of Punch with her chambermaid, thus rendering Mrs. Betty “fragrant of Lemmon-Zest, and Nutmeg”—a thing I must confess to finding strangely erotic.
The old-school way of preparing the oleo-saccharum, which Thomas endorses, is “by rubbing lumps of sugar on the rind, which breaks the delicate little vessels that contain the essence, and at the same time absorbs it.” But as the anonymous and astute author of the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual observes, “this process is laborious, and seldom followed by the best punch mixers, save when a goodly number are to be supplied.” Whether or not to use it is moot, however, as modern sugar is too weak. I don’t mean in sweetness but rather in cohesion and abrasiveness. Nineteenth-century commentators talk of this process stripping lemons of their yellow outer skin entirely, but I’ve tried it with every kind of modern sugarloaf, cube and crystal I could procure and only ended up with a mass of crumbled, faintly scented sugar and a lemon undimmed in its yellowness. In this, our ancestors had the advantage on us.
If the traditional way doesn’t work, then what? By far the most effective method I’ve found is to peel the fruit with a sharp, swivel-bladed vegetable peeler, trying to get as little of the white pith as possible. With a little practice, you should be able to turn out broad spirals of impressive length (which will make it easier when it comes time to remove them). These are then muddled firmly in a sturdy bowl along with two ounces of sugar per peel and then left to sit in a warm place for at least half an hour, and preferably twice that. During that period, if the peels are at all fresh, the sugar will draw forth an impressive amount of additional oil. After the peels are muddled again to incorporate the oil, they are ready for use.
This process is admittedly time-consuming and to some degree a laborious one. In the nineteenth century, there were those, such as the adventurous Dr. Strauss (there was seemingly not a revolution in the middle of the century that Gustave Louis Maurice Strauss didn’t have a hand in, until age and impecuniousness forced him into Bohemia, writing and then, worst of all, culinary writing), who suggested substituting commercial essence of lemon for the peel, on the dubious grounds that it is “more uniform.” Do not even attempt this. Others suggested that the best way to incorporate the oleo-saccharum is to put the peels in the spirits and let them infuse for a couple of hours. While this isn’t ineffective, I find it produces a less vibrant lemoniness than the above method, and it takes even longer, although it is admittedly easier.
PILLAR II: THE SHRUB. The term of art for the mixture of sugar and citrus juice upon which Punch is constructed is variously given as “sherbet” or “shrub.” In either case, it indicates the stage where the oleo-saccharum and the juice have been incorporated, sometimes with a little water as well, if that’s needed to dissolve the sugar. “Shrub” is also used to refer to the same thing, but with some or all of the spirits added. Both nonalcoholic and alcoholic shrubs can be bottled and will keep, although their flavor will change with aging. The nonalcoholic kind is, however, more perishable and must be kept refrigerated. The boozy shrub can be kept in
a cool, dark place. Either will have to be filtered after a couple of days to remove precipitates.
As an ancillary measure to employing the oleo-saccharum, there are those who suggest an additional means of adding lemon flavor to Punch. This time it’s the pulp and pips we’re dealing with. The more finicky of the authorities of yore, recognizing that even such Punch draff has a contribution that it could make, emphasize that it should not be discarded without having its flavor extracted. For some, this is accomplished simply by waiting to strain the juice until after it has been mixed with the oleo-saccharum. The real adepts, however, favor running a little boiling water over the strained solids, in order to leach out the flavor from the unbroken juice cells and dissolve and incorporate the jellylike coating of the pips, which is reputed to be rich in lemoniness. I have not found this to be essential, but neither have I found it to be in any way detrimental to the final flavor of the Punch.
PILLAR III: THE ORDER. Then there’s the whole vexed and dogmatized question of when to put in what, which is tied in with the issue of temperature. William Maginn, one of the reigning literary wits of the Regency years, stated the general principles most concisely in one of his popular “Maxims of ODoherty [sic],” many of which are devoted to Punch and its manufacture: “In making hot toddy, or hot punch, you must put in the spirits before the water: in cold punch, grog, &c., the other way.” The rationale behind this distinction, which Maginn declines to provide, appears to be twofold. One, sugar dissolves poorly in spirits unless they’re hot. For cold Punch, therefore, it’s best to dissolve the sugar in the water before adding the booze. Two, hot Punch should be as hot as possible. If you add the water first, it will cool as you stir it to dissolve the sugar. Therefore, since dissolution is much less of a problem in hot liquids, it can go in last. This sounds fairly logical, and yet there were those who disagreed, and bitterly. Dr. Strauss, at least, was civil about it when he suggested that the best procedure with the water was a two-part one: put some in (hot or cold, depending on how the Punch will be served) with the sugar and lemon juice, to dissolve it. Then add the spirits. Then add the remaining water. Revolutionary or not, he was a sensible man.
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