Punch

by David Wondrich

  Even in America, the Land That Rum Built, there was real Arrack Punch from the early days, and it was popular enough. In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd struck out deep into the American hinterland on a mission to determine the Virginia-Carolina border, he found the locals moistening the clay with such rustic concoctions as Bombo—basically, strong Rum Toddy (i.e., rum, sugar and water) without the crucial scrape of nutmeg that makes it fit for civilized ingestion—and the by turns frightening and alluring “Fricassee of Rum” (“They Fry’d half a Dozen Rashers of very fat Bacon in a Pint of Rum, both which being disht up together, serv’d the Company at once for meat and Drink”). But he also found Colonel Harvey Harrison, whose “good house was enough to spoil us for Woodsmen,” as he wrote in his diary: there they “drank Rack-Punch” in the evening and “trod on Carpets” when they went to bed.

  Considering that mercantilist trade policies dictated that that arrack had to be shipped from India or points east to England be-fore it could be transshipped to America, where it then had to be carried practically by hand into the backcountry, you can imagine what it cost. Even in the more settled parts of the country, it was expensive. In 1736, when Virginian William Randolph bought a twenty-four-hundred-acre tract of Crown land that happened to include a parcel his friend Peter Jefferson had had his eye on, he agreed to sell Jefferson two hundred acres of it for fifty pounds and another two hundred in return for, as the deed reads, “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of arrack punch to him delivered.”an

  By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, though, Arrack Punch had begun to lose its grip, both in America and in the mother country. In 1829, The Southern Review, published in Charles-ton, South Carolina, gave notice of that when it mocked Louis Eustache Ude, who had been cook to the unfortunate Louis XVI, for recommending in his 1827 magnum opus, The French Cook, that certain characteristic English dishesare to be washed down . . . with the Ponge au The, or the Ponge a la Rhom, or a la Rac a l’ Anglais . . . it being well known that rum punch and arrack punch are in great request among all the upper classes of society in England!

  Arrack Punch didn’t die out entirely, to be sure, at least not right away; there were always a few epicures for whom anything else was a mere understudy—men like Henry William Herbert, the pioneer American sportswriter, who always made himself a glass of Arrack Punch before retiring for the night. But its fate foreshadowed that of Punch in general: from daily service, it was remanded to the reserves, only to be called up in times of great mixological crisis. The wealthy and the celebrated stopped sluicing themselves with it, those who would be either stopped affecting it and those who would be neither stopped aspiring to it. In 1838, as if to put a period on its years of imperium, its greatest proponent died.

  From the last years of the old century until 1831, when he resigned his post at age eighty-six, Captain Charles Morris was the spirit presiding over the venerable and riotous London institution known as the “Sublime Society of Beef Steaks,” founded in 1735. At five o’clock every Saturday from November to June, twenty-five aristocratic sports and their guests gathered together to eat nothing but grilled steak (with a few fixings) and drink nothing but port wine and Arrack Punch (the society had been limited to twenty-four until 1785, when George Augustus Frederick, the Prince of Wales, wanted in). Morris, who had an extraordinary facility for throwing together impromptu verses and songs, many of them quite frank in their diction, was sort of a song-leader and, more to the point, the man in charge of making the Punch. “It was amusing to see him at his laboratory at the sideboard,” one initiate later recalled, “stocked with the various products that enter into the composition of that nectareous mixture: then smacking an elementary glass or two, and giving a significant nod, the fiat of its excellence.” Alas, if Morris’s exact recipe survives, I have not been able to find it; all we have are tantalizing descriptions of the “mantling beauties” of this “potent” and “fascinating draught ‘That flames and dances in its crystal bound’” (the quote is from Milton’s youth, before England knew Punch). In any case, these sparse descriptions of the captain’s Punch-making suggest that in his rendition, it was somewhat more elaborate than the old East India Company version; after all, he was mixing for royals and aristocrats, and the Prince of Wales, for one, had very elaborate tastes indeed when it came to Punch (see Regent’s Punch in Chapter XVII).

  Captain Morris holds forth. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

  At least the society’s arrack would’ve been genuine Batavia. That was not always the case—London’s Vauxhall Gardens was famous for serving an Arrack Punch in which the “arrack” was in fact nothing more than cheap rum flavored with benzoin, a kind of tree gum. As Thackeray notes in Vanity Fair, a work in which Vauxhall’s Rack Punch plays a brief but pivotal role, “there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch.” Thus speaketh experience. But right through the end of the nineteenth century you could still find true arrack if you looked hard enough, although it grew increasingly uncommon in the English-speaking world (Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia kept it much more present). Imagine the dismay those Punchy old-timers felt when they stopped in at the spirits merchant’s for a bottle of his finest old Batavia only to be told “we don’t get no call for it anymore, sorry.” That’s the risk one runs by having archaic tastes, by standing against the general degeneration of the age. I felt the same heartsink when they stopped importing the old Bols green-bottle genever or when, one after another, the bonded bourbons were edged off the liquor-store shelf to make room for another flavored vodka. For the arrack-drinker, it must have been vermouth, crème de violette and London dry gin that did the dirty deed.

  But we live in times of wonder, and the rack is back—which means that this chapter need not be a purely theoretical one. Here, then, are five ways of making Arrack Punch, two from the beginning of its career and three from what was until recently the end.

  BOMBAY PRESIDENCY PUNCH

  Unfortunately, the earliest descriptions of Punch, even when they are obliging enough to list its component parts, are silent when it comes to how much of each was employed in its mixing, and in mixology, proportions are everything. In 1694, however, General Sir John Gayer, governor of the East India Company’s Bombay “Presidency” (as its possessions in northwest India were known), diverted a fraction of his attention from encouraging trade and repairing the damage inflicted on its capital by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who five years before had laid siege to the place and effectively destroyed it, to regulating the small but important matter of Punch. Because Gayer was a bureaucrat and not an artist, he did not shrink from specifying proportions for the prime ingredients. For this alone, his formula is valuable. But beyond just specifying them, he specified good ones, with a liberal dose of lime juice (limes were cheap and plentiful in India). Indeed, I have found them so excellent that, under the regrettably imprecise name of “Bombay Government Punch,” I made them my standard ones and have tested them with a plethora of arracks, rums and brandies, alone and in combination, and never found them wanting (see the epilogue). Made as it is detailed in the following instructions, though, with an attempt at re-creating the precise formula dished out in the Punch houses of the company’s Indian dominions, Gayer’s Punch is as simple as it is delicate, and it possesses an elusive charm that is quite unlike that of any other Punch, Cocktail or mixed drink.

  Be forewarned, though: as one of the governor’s predecessors wrote in 1676, “the usuall effect of that accursed Bombay Punch” involves its consumers “besotting themselves with drunkenness” and then quarreling, dueling and committing any number of other acts “to the shame, scandall, and ruine of our nation and religion.” I haven’t seen any dueling yet when I’ve trotted out this formula, but there’s been an argument or two, and no end of blaspheming.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  If any man comes into a victualling house to drink punch, he may demand one quart good Goa arak, half a pound of sugar and half a pint of g
ood lime water; and make his own punch. If the bowl be not marked with the clerk of the market’s seal, then the bowl may be freely broken without paying anything either for bowl or punch.

  SOURCE: Order Book of the Bombay Government, August 13, 1694

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  Break up 8 ounces of jaggery or palm sugar and put it into a three-quart Punch bowl. Add 8 ounces lime juice and muddle together until all the sugar has dissolved. Add 1 quart Sri Lankan palm arrack (or any other palm arrack) and stir. Add 5 cups water and grate nutmeg over the top.

  YIELD: 10 cups.

  NOTES

  While this recipe is a good place to play around with exotic Asian palm sugars, they are not essential to its success (and it should be noted that they are not all alike: if yours is hard, you might have to dissolve it first in 1 cup boiling water, subtracting that amount from the water that goes in at the end). You’ll notice that Gayer’s order said nothing about dilution, presumably because if you’re brewing the stuff yourself you can add however much water you like (it would be useful, however, to have a close look at one of those seal-stamped bowls). Another government regulation, this one from the mother country in 1736, suggests that Punch should have no more than two parts water to one of spirits, but the spirits then were generally higher in proof than much of what we get now, so it’s best to start with equal parts and adjust upward. The order also makes no mention of spice. Nutmeg is always appropriate, though, but you can also use Mandelslo’s rosewater—start with no more than a teaspoon, and adjust from there—or Bernier’s mace, in which case you’ll need to muddle a blade of it in with the sugar before adding the lime juice.

  If you want to go straight seventeenth century, you’ll need some sea biscuit to float on top, an item not nearly so common as it once was. And yet it’s still a staple in Alaska, Hawaii still goes through a fair amount of it and Maine consumes its share. Look online for “hardtack” or “pilot bread.” In the brief period when bread was considered a useful part of Punch, common toast was spoken of as an effective substitute for the sea biscuit, and I’ve had acceptable results from Carr’s Table Water Crackers, although it’s not something I shall repeat. If you want to add ice, authenticity be damned, go right ahead.

  MERITON LATROON’S BANTAM PUNCH

  India wasn’t the only Punch-drenched part of the East. We must not neglect Java and Sumatra and their neighboring islands. The ports of Batavia and Bantam and, a little later, Bencoolenao were packed cheek to jowl with Punch houses. When the English privateer Woodes Rogers put into Batavia in 1710, he noted that some of his crew “were hugging each other, others blessing themselves that they were come to such a glorious Place for Punch, where they could have Arack for 8 Pence per Gallon, and Sugar for 1 Peny a Pound.”

  While we may share the sailors’ joy, it doesn’t help us much with the mixology. Nor, alas, do the accounts of other contemporary travelers. It is as if once they put into these ports, the seafarers found something there to creep in through their mouths and steal away their brains. Fortunately, there exists one source that communicates some details about what Punch meant in the eastern parts of the East Indies. In 1665, one Richard Head—perhaps early English prose fiction’s most disreputable practitioner, and that’s saying something—published the work for which he is remembered: The English Rogue: Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant. For “witty extravagant,” read “utter scumbag.” Latroon, the book’s narrator, is a runaway apprentice who steals, swills, swives and swindles his way through England and Ireland until the powers that be decide that the best place for him is anywhere else and transport him abroad (and that’s only the censored version; as Head’s friend William Winstanley wrote, the book in its original form “being too much smutty, would not be Licensed, so that he was fain to refine it”).

  Head, an expert at swilling himself, renders his hero’s swilling in considerable detail. Ultimately, that swilling even extends to Punch, marking its earliest appearances in English fiction. That Punch-drinking doesn’t happen in the British Isles, though, but rather in Bantam, where Latroon finds himself after a chain of unfortunate and highly unlikely events. There, in the street called “China Row,” he not only drinks “very immoderately of punch, rack, tea & c. which was brought up in great china jugs holding at least two quarts” but marries the Indian Punch-house keeper who supplies it to him. (Nobody said he was stupid.) It’s unclear from the text whether the rack and tea were combined to make the Punch or whether they were separate drinks. But then again, one shouldn’t wonder at the confusion: neither Head nor Francis Kirkman, who published a 1668 continuation of the book (probably without Head’s collaboration) that picks up where the first volume left off and thus begins with Punch-drinking, had ever been to the Indies.

  Whether the recipe was cribbed from an as-yet-undiscovered travel book or picked up from a sailor in a bar, the Punch detailed in The English Rogue is of doubtful provenance, and even though there’s nothing about it that explicitly forbids us doing so, it would be rash to take it as an authentic depiction of what was being mixed and drunk in Java.ap Yet if we disregard such qualms and do our best to re-create the recipe as if it were indeed authentic, using what would have been available at that time and place, we end up with a beverage that is as dark, rich and almost meaty as the Bombay Presidency Punch is light and delicate, and thus have the two poles of Punch-making in its original rangeland.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  For we had not only the country drink called toddee, which is made of the juice of several trees, and punch, which is made of rack-lime, or lime-water, sugar, spices, and sometimes the addition of amber-grease, but we likewise drank great quantities of Persian wine, which is much like claret, and brought from that country in bottles.

  SOURCE: Richard Head/Francis Kirkman, The English Rogue, Continued, in the Life of Meriton Latroon and Other Extravagants. Comprehending the Most Eminent Cheats of Most Trades and Professions. The Second Part, 1668

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  In a mortar or small bowl, muddle a piece of ambergris the size of a grain of barley with an ounce of Indonesian gula jawa or other dark, funky sugar until it has been incorporated. Add 2 ounces Batavia arrack and muddle again until sugar has dissolved. Break up 5 ounces of gula jawa, put it in a two-quart jug with 6 ounces lime juice and muddle together until the sugar has dissolved. Add the ambergris-sugar-arrack mixture and stir. Add the remains of the 750-milliliter bottle of Batavia arrack from which you have removed the 2 ounces to mix with the ambergris, stir again, and finish with 3 to 4 cups water, according to taste. Grate nutmeg over the top.

  NOTES

  Ambergris is clotted whale cholesterol, secreted in large lumps that float around until they wash ashore. That doesn’t sound very appetizing, but by the time it washes up, ambergris has aged into a lightly, sweetly and very persistently fragrant substance that most resembles soap. What with the present state of the whale, it is also hideously expensive, but then again, it was never cheap (see “Sources for Rare Ingredients and Tools,” page 281). Since it is essentially a fat, it must be rendered mixable before it can be used, which the above process will do. If the trouble, expense (it goes for about twenty dollars a gram) or squick factor is too much for you, it may easily be omitted, although it does add a subtle, insinuating I-know-not-what to the Punch that cannot otherwise be replicated.

  For muddling the ambergris, regular demerara sugar is better at absorbing the fragrance, if less authentic. If you can’t get gula jawa, which is a sticky, funky mix of palm and sugarcane sugars, then muscovado, piloncillo, panela or jaggery will do. But it’s worth tracking the real stuff down, as it gives the Punch its porterlike color and a good deal of its umami-driven brothiness. If you don’t have a pitcher, a bowl will of course work just fine. I don’t recommend ice here, although an hour in the refrigerator will do no harm.

  If you wish to incorporate tea, as Head’s brief note seems to suggest, add 3 cups of hot green tea, made
with 3 teaspoons of loose tea or three tea bags, to the sugar-lime juice- ambergris extract mixture, stir and then add the arrack. Add, if necessary, another cup of cool water at the end.

  YIELD: 8 cups.

  ODOHERTY’S ARRACK PUNCH

  The Arrack Punch drunk in Britain in the early eighteenth century was, as far as I can determine, essentially indistinguishable from the Rum Punch and the Brandy Punch, save in its motive element. As the century wore on and the use of that element grew less and less general, though, the definition of Arrack Punch seems to have changed, from “Punch made from arrack” to “Punch with some arrack in it.” Captain Morris’s Punch, I suspect, was of the latter variety.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that: one of my favorite recipes from Jerry Thomas’s book has long been the one he gave for “a very pretty three tumblers” of Arrack Punch. Indeed, when I had to pick one of his drinks to make at the Slow Food tribute to him that was held at the Plaza Hotel in 2003, it’s the one I chose. Even when I learned, years later, that the recipe was lifted, pretty tumblers and all, from William Maginn’s “Maxims of ODoherty,” a widely popular series of crotchety observations on drink, cigars and life in general that appeared in Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s Magazine in 1824, it did not diminish my enjoyment of it, although it did do fatal injury to my cherished mental picture of the young Jerry Thomas learning to make genuine Arrack Punch at the side of one of his grizzled bunkmates on the Annie Smith, the ship from which he ran away to the goldfields of California as soon as it docked in San Francisco in 1849. No matter. American sailor or Scottish physician, whoever committed it to paper knew his Punch. Indeed, to drink a bumper of it is to understand Captain Morris’s most famous lines:’Tis by the glow my bumper gives