Punch

by David Wondrich

  By 1700, the Irish and their fellow Celts the Scots had been drinking aqua vitae made from grain—usquebaugh, uisce beatha, whiskeyaz—recreationally for well over two centuries. The Irish in particular gained an early reputation for heroic consumption, but that may be only because the English, having seized the greater part of their country, could observe its population more closely. In any case, by Shakespeare’s day, their spirits-tippling was proverbial: “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter,” says the jealous Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, “Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.” Well, okay. But Shakespeare might have had a point about the Irish part, anyway, if we’re to believe James Howell’s description of how they drank the stuff. First off, they weren’t really mixing it with anything. Uisce beatha was a raw grain distillate infused with raisins and spices in the medieval manner. In England, where there were a few, anyway, who appreciated it, it was drunk in “aqua-vitae measures”—basically, shot glasses. In its native land, however, as Howell wrote in 1645, “it goes down . . . by beer glassfuls, being more natural to the nation.”

  In Scotland, the consumption seems to have been fully as large but not as well recorded. The fifth of the Statutes of Icolmkill, a set of stipulations negotiated in 1609 between the principal chieftains of the Western Islands, cited as one of the major causes of the continuing barbarity and poverty of their lands “thair extraordinair drinking of strong wynis and acquavitie” brought in among them by merchants. Their solution—to ban the importation of wines and spirits, but allow all men the liberty of brewing “aquavitie and uthir drink to serve thair awne housis”—would only have encouraged whiskey-drinking. As in Ireland, the Scots seem to have drunk their whiskey in infused form, with honey and spices. We must bear in mind that even in undoctored form, what Scotland and Ireland were making was a far cry from what we consider today to be whiskey—the unaged liquor was raw and oily and redolent of peat smoke, and also very strong. Few outsiders could even bring themselves to try it.

  A rare exception was Captain Edmund Burt, an English engineer who spent most of the 1730s in the Scottish Highlands. Normally, he avoided the native tipples by traveling with a bottle of his own brandy and the necessary lemons and sugar for Punch. But even the stoutest oak must yield to a gale, and one evening found him in a hut with nothing to drink but river water or the whiskey a parcel of smugglers were transporting down from the glens. Luckily, he still had a few lemons, with which he “so far qualified the ill taste of the spirit as to make it tolerable.” It was not an experiment he repeated; when he was in Inverness, his usual base, or Edinburgh, he could get Punch made with brandy or rum, the same as in London.

  By Burt’s day, at least the idea of Punch had reached the Highlands, if not necessarily the precise thing itself. “When they choose to qualify [whiskey] for Punch,” he observed, “they sometimes mix it with water and honey, or with milk and honey; at other times, the mixture is only the aqua vitae, sugar and butter; this they burn till the sugar and butter are dissolved.” (Could this be another hint that “punch” was originally a word for any mixed drink in a bowl?) Indeed, when, at a country inn in the hills outside Inverness, the captain’s servant was squeezing lemons for his master’s Brandy Punch, the landlord asked him quite seriously “if those were apples he was squeezing.” It would be a while before the lemon in any form entered the general run of Scottish country Punch-making; in 1773, Samuel Johnson, touring the Hebrides with Boswell, wrote to his beloved Mrs. Thrale that “their punch is made without lemons, or any substitute.”

  That’s understandable, under the circumstances. Until the English built their military roads through the Highlands after the crushed rebellion of 1745, there weren’t even footpaths through most of the region, let alone roads. Hardly less remote were large parts of the Irish countryside, where Punch nonetheless crept in as well. (That seems to have happened between the mid 1740s, when Isaac Butler, in the course of a longish ramble through Ulster, found the whiskey still being drunk in the old style, with mint and butter, and 1775, when Thomas Campbell encountered proper Whiskey Punch in Tipperary.ba) Yet deprivation can teach as well as hinder. Once lemons did become readily available to whiskey-drinkers, there were certainly some who were happy to use them. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, the Edinburgh Infirmary was prescribing, in cases of dropsy, “a quart to four pints a day” of Whiskey Punch, “acidulated with lemon juice” (one might almost wish to be dropsical). And in their absence, there were those who cast about for substitutes: Captain Fancourt, who was stationed in Ireland around the same time, noted that Whiskey Punch was sometimes “acidulated with black currants when lemons were not at hand.” But both groups put together still formed a small minority.

  Most Whiskey Punch-drinkers, given the choice, preferred to do without the lemon juice. English Punch-drinkers had already established that spice was the fifth leg of the chair; nice when you had it, but nobody was going to call off a perfectly good Punch party for want of a little nutmeg. The Scots and Irish further determined that if your whiskey was good enough, you could saw off another leg. The scrupulous drew a lexical distinction: if it had lemon, it was Punch; if not, Toddy. Many used the terms interchangeably. That freedom of terminology was made easier by another learned lesson. Ireland and Scotland are not India or Indonesia or even England. The cold and the wet are constant for eight months of the year and intermittent the other four. Whiskey Punch, consequently, was almost always drunk at a temperature at which the cooling properties of the lemon juice were not needed or even desired. Acids become more corrosive as their temperature increases, and hot lemon juice consumed in the quantities one hears mentioned—quarts, gallons, firkins—ceases to be pleasant. The solution was to split the difference between Punch and Toddy—to use the acid-free but flavorful peel of the lemon and leave out the juice.

  We don’t know if it was an Irishman or a Scot who first established this procedure. It appeared on both sides of the Giant’s Causeway at roughly the same time, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Procedures differed little, if at all, the only distinction between an Irish Whiskey Punch and a Scotch one being the nature of the whiskey. At first, that was no distinction at all, although by the turn of the nineteenth century, distillers in the two countries were starting to explore the divergent paths that they have followed since.

  Eventually, this hot Whiskey Punch would spread from the Celtic lands to England, across the Atlantic and indeed to every corner of the earth where a lousy climate and poor heating make a warming drink an object of utility. In England, it became something of a sporting-life favorite, embraced by such men as the actor George Frederick Cooke, who could with a straight face lecture a young colleague on the dangers of intemperance and dissipation while drinking “jug after jug” of it. When King George IV, who was scarcely less dissipated than Mr. Cooke, visited Ireland in 1821, practically the first words out of his mouth to his Irish subjects were, “I assure you, my dear friends, I have an Irish heart and will this night give a proof of my affection towards you . . . by drinking your health in a bumper of whisky-punch.” While I’ll bet he said that to all the countries, he wasn’t one to drink just anything—his consumption was vast but not indiscriminate (see Regent’s Punch), and rumor had it he drank Irish Whiskey Punch even when he wasn’t sucking up to the subjects.

  Even the pope himself learned to like it, according to Samuel Ferguson’s 1838 Father Tom and the Pope, or A Night at the Vatican, which tells the story of Father Tom from County Leitrim and his visit to “Room,” where the pope “axed him to take pot look wid him.” Alas, Ferguson’s priest was a creature of the imagination. But few conceits in nineteenth-century fiction are as ludicrous as the thought of sour, reactionary old Gregory XVI, the pontiff in question, sitting down with an Irish country priest who produces a bottle of good “putteen” from under his cassock and instructs his
host how to make Punch: “Now, your Holiness,” says Father Tom in Ferguson’s imagination,this bein’ the first time you ever dispinsed them chymicals . . . I’ll jist make bould to lay doun one rule ov orthography . . . for conwhounding them. . . . Put in the sperits first . . . and then put in the sugar; and remember, every dhrop ov wather you put in after that, spoils the punch.

  “Glory be to God!” cries the pope in stage-Irish (Gregory was born Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari), “I never knewn what dhrink was afore.”

  The church was not amused, but everybody else was: Ferguson’s satire was widely popular wherever English was spoken and stayed in print for the rest of the century; indeed, Father Tom’s philosophy of Punch-making, and in particular the bit about the water, became axiomatic.

  The church did, however, exact revenge of a sort, in the form of the charismatic Father Mathew, who in 1838 founded a total temperance society; within ten years, he had enrolled more than half the adult population of Ireland, in the process putting paid to the tumbler of Whiskey Punch as a national beverage. Here, anyway, are five ways to avoid taking the pledge.

  BLACKWOOD’S HOT WHISKEY PUNCH

  The so-called Scottish Enlightenment saw the land north of the Tweed come into its own, intellectually anyway. Characterized by a peculiarly Scottish mixture of deep and daring thought and down-to-earth practicality, it was at full boil from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the French Revolution, at which point the Edinburgh intellectuals had to pull in their horns lest they be thought seditious. But the Scots are a stubborn people, and a number of them carried right on with the speculating, philosophizing, criticizing and whatever else it is intellectuals do when they’re feeling their oats. Among the manifestations of this low-key ferment was one we have already come across more than once, Edinburgh’s Blackwood’s Magazine—one of the greatest journals in the history of publishing. Among the things that made it so were the so-called Noctes Ambrosianae, or “Ambrosian Nights,” a lengthy series of lightly fictionalized dialogues between various Scottish intellectuals who drink Punch at Ambrose’s tavern in Edinburgh and chew over the issues of the day. Written chiefly by John Wilson, at first with the assistance of the novelist James Hogg and our friends William “ODoherty” Maginn and John Gibson “Glasgow Punch” Lockhart and then without it, the series ran from 1822 to 1835. Collected, it fills five fat volumes. I can’t pretend to have read through them all, but the stretches I’ve read abundantly display the Scottish Enlightenment’s characteristic mixture of erudition and homeliness; free-thinking, muscular culture and good humor. And there’s always Whiskey Punch, and it’s always drunk hot.

  Screeching hot. GREG BOEHM

  Between the lively, informed conversation and the steady drinking without apparent inebriation, the nights at Ambrose’s were taken by a generation of bright young men as the very model of modern social tippling, free from the brutishness and foolish high jinks that dominated the stereotypes (and often the reality) of gatherings high and low, and yet not stuffy or old-fashioned. That did nothing at all to hinder the popularity of Whiskey Punch.

  This recipe is from another of Shelton Mackenzie’s useful mixological footnotes, this one to the annotated 1854 New York edition of the Noctes. It tallies in detail and spirit with the practices depicted in many a passage in the dialogues. It most emphatically does not tally with another famous scene of Whiskey Punch-making, which first appeared in the pages of Blackwood’s—that of Father Tom and the pope. Ferguson, an Irishman himself, should have known full well that at least some of the water goes in first when making Punch, if only to dissolve the sugar. On the other hand, if Father Tom could be faulted for his technique, I’m sure he would regard Mackenzie’s formula, with its two parts water to one of whiskey, with the scorn and loathing due a particularly nasty heresy.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  The mystery of making whisky-punch comes with practice. The sugar should be first dissolved in a small quantity of water, which must be what the Irish call “screeching hot.” Next throw in the whisky. Then add a thin shaving of fresh lemon peel. Then add the rest of the water, so that the spirits will be a third of the mixture. Lastly,—Drink! Lemon juice is deleterious and should be eschewed.

  SOURCE: R. Shelton Mackenzie, ed., Noctes Ambrosianae, 1854

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  In a heatproof bowl, pot or jug, prepare an oleo-saccharum with the peel of one lemon and 2 ounces demerara sugar. Set a quart and a half of water to boil. Add 8 ounces or so of the boiling water to the sugar (the quantity doesn’t have to be exact), stirring well; this should warm up the bowl as well as dissolve the sugar. Add a 750-milliliter bottle of Scotch or Irish whiskey and then the rest of the water, or as much of it as you can tolerate. The Punch should be kept warm, whether in a jug by the fireside, a bowl on a hot plate on the sideboard, or a Crock-Pot wherever the extension cord reaches.

  NOTES

  Jerry Thomas, who has much to say about Whiskey Punch, suggests to “steep the thin yellow shavings of lemon peel in the whiskey.” This is a fine idea, if you can plan forty-eight hours ahead (don’t leave them in longer than that; they’ll get bitter and spoil the whiskey).

  The 2 ounces of sugar is a baseline; if the Punch lacks unctuousness, adjust upward. I like a raw demerara for this. As for the whiskey, Thomas gives us a rare brand recommendation when he specifies Kinnahan’s Lord Lieutenant for his Irish Whiskey Punch. Unfortunately, “the very Cream of Irish Whiskies,” as it used to proclaim itself, is no more. But like all Irish whiskeys of the time, it would have been a thick, rich and smooth pure pot-still product. There are only a few of these left, but if you can get the Bushmills 10 or the Redbreast, you’ll have a heavenly Punch on your hands. Otherwise, John Powers or Black Bush or any of the richer blends will do.

  Thomas is particular when it comes to Scotch Whiskey Punch as well, calling for “Glenlivet or Islay, of the best quality.” The Islay he stocked, Caol Ila, is still around and excellent; by “Glenlivet,” he meant any one of a number of whiskeys from the region, Speyside, not just the Glenlivet—not that there’s anything wrong with that Glenlivet. In any case, hot Whiskey Punch demands a pure malt whiskey. As a good Scot (on my mother’s side), I’ll add that it can be a vatted malt (or “blended malt,” as they confusingly now must be called); it can be a young malt (indeed, it’s better young); it can be a cheap malt. That doesn’t matter—you’re concerned with the pot-still body of the stuff rather than the nuances of flavor. Whatever’s on sale will work fine, as will the bottle your boss regifted you with.

  About the quantity of water that goes into hot Whiskey Punch, gentlemen may be allowed to differ. Personally, I’ll keep Father Tom’s rubicund visage in mind as I add the hot water, stopping when his scowl registers strong disapproval but not yet open disgust. That usually occurs when I’ve added a quart or so per 750-milliliter bottle of whiskey.

  YIELD: up to 9 cups.

  COLD SCOTCH OR IRISH WHISKEY PUNCH

  Irish whiskey and (especially) its Scotch cousin have a persistent graininess that can render them tricky to mix with; you can’t simply plug them into your old rum- or brandy-based Punch recipes and expect something delicious. Case in point, this entry from the diary of Tennyson’s friend William Allingham: “After dinner T[ennyson] concocts an experimental punch with whisky and claret—not successful.” I would think not, but had Tennyson mixed brandy and claret, there would’ve been Punch Royal and smiles all around. One must appreciate the poetic impulse, anyway.

  The Irish, despite their poetic bent, agreed with their Caledonian cousins on the subject of cold Whiskey Punch: the best way to make it was to make hot Whiskey Punch and leave it sitting around for a while. If you must add something, both agreed, let it be a small proportion of the lemon juice. Small, though, d’ye ken? Made thus—well, to quote the character in the Noctes Ambrosianae through which John Wilson channeled the crusty James Hogg, “it has a gran’ taste, and a maist seducin smell . . . the drink seems to be . . .
as innocent as the dew o’ lauchin [i.e., laughing] lassie’s lip, yet it’s just as dangerous, and leads insensibly on, by littles and wees, to a state o’ unconscious intoxication.”

  The formula, such as it is, is from Jerry Thomas. The Punch is delicious.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  Cold Whiskey Punch

  This beverage ought always to be made with boiling water, and allowed to concoct and cool for a day or two before it is put on the table. In this way, the materials get more intensely amalgamated than cold water and cold whiskey ever get.

  SOURCE: Jerry Thomas, Bar-Tenders Guide, 1862

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  Follow the same steps as for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch (on previous page). Once the Punch is prepared, let it cool, strain it and refrigerate it in a sealed container. For Lemon Punch, as Thomas notes, “a small proportion of juice is added before the whiskey is poured in.” Three ounces should do it. Serve in a bowl poured over a one-quart block of ice.

  NOTES

  Again, see Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch—although in this one you can probably get away with a blended Scotch, if it’s a richish one. Once you’re adding ice, the texture of the whiskey is less important. And I suggest you use all the water; cold Punch is meant to be refreshing.