YIELD: 9 cups.
AMERICAN WHISKEY PUNCH
In the early nineteenth century, Americans drank a fair amount of Scotch- and Irish-based Whiskey Punch, particularly in New York and Boston. As one might expect, they also made it out of their own peculiar kind of whiskey. There were, however, certain issues with it. During the Revolution, it had gotten us through. John Adams summed up the situation well in a letter he wrote to Abigail from Philadelphia in the difficult summer of 1777 (so difficult, he noted, that Punch was up to twenty shillings a bowl): “As to sugar, molasses, rum, &c., we must leave them off. Whiskey is used here instead of rum, and I don’t see but it is just as good.” Even after the war—well, let’s just say that the republic was young and poor, and raw rye and corn whiskey cheap and plentiful and some things happened. Barrels of Pennsylvania rye and Kentucky corn traveled “smooth miles of turnpike way, / And stumpy roads, that crack the creaking wains,” to quote “The Progress of Whiskey,” a semicoherent parody of Thomas Gray’s famous ode on the progress of poesy that appeared in the United States Literary Gazette in 1825, finally ending their journey “amid the odorous shade / Of New York’s boundless cellars laid” or by being made into “rich streams of whiskey punch” for the social enjoyment of the golden youth of Boston.
But that was American Whiskey Punch’s high point, at least as a communal drink. Before too many years had passed, if one were to broach the possibility of a festive bowl of it in polite company, one would meet with an answer such as this, from an 1835 short story: “Whiskey-punch . . . I thought was banished from all refined society.” By then, in polite society, it was all about the Regent’s Punch or the Punch à la Romaine (see Chapter XVII). In less polite society, both the whiskey and the bowl were out of favor, the former yielding to French brandy and Holland gin (drinking imported being an essential part of the front every sporting man must maintain) and the latter to the individual Punch made by the glass (for which see Imbibe!). In still less polite circles, well, then as now, you drinks what you can get.
By the time domestic whiskey became an acceptable tipple again for the kind of people who drank their Punches by the bowl, those people were no longer drinking their Punches by the bowl save on special occasions, and the Punches they were making then were complex affairs in which the whiskey played a supporting role at best (see Chapter XVIII for those). All of this is by way of explaining why early recipes for straight American Whiskey Punch are very rare indeed. This one, an expedient of desperation, comes from Frank Forester, the pioneering American sportswriter. Forester, however, was born Henry William Herbert, in England; that might have colored his perception of the quality of rye whiskey.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
It is well that a Sportsman, without being anything of an epicure, should, like an old campaigner, know a little of the art of the cuisine. . . . I commend him also to be his own liquor-bearer, as the spirits in country places are usually execrable, especially the rye-whiskey of Pennsylvania and the West.
If, however, he determine to take his chance in this matter . . . [t]he best receipt I know for cold punch, and that which I always use, is, to one tumbler of crushed sugar, one and a-half of spirit, six of water, the peel of two lemons, and the juice of one.
SOURCE: “Frank Forester” [Henry William Herbert], “A Few Memoranda and Brief Receipts for Sportsmen,” 1849
SUGGESTED PROCEDURE
In a three-quart bowl, prepare an oleo-saccharum with 8 ounces white sugar and the peel of two lemons. Add 1½ ounces lemon juice and 8 ounces water and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add 12 ounces cask-strength rye or bourbon, stir again and add between 3 and 6 cups of cold water, to taste. A quart-sized block of ice or enough cubes or pieces of it to fill the bowl past halfway are an excellent addition.
NOTES
More lemon juice is a fine addition: use up to 6 ounces, to taste. If you can’t get cask-strength whiskey, use 16 ounces of 100-proof or 18 ounces of 80-proof and dock the water by 4 or 6 ounces accordingly.
YIELD: up to 9 cups.
CANADIAN PUNCH
Despite its undeniable richness of flavor, American whiskey has proven itself to be much more mixable than the Irish or especially Scotch variety. Take the following combination from Jerry Thomas, printed, as usual, without comment as to its origin. The idea of combining Scotch and pineapple gives me the shudders; rye and pineapple, however, makes for a wholly satisfying mixture.
I don’t know if the “Canadian” this Punch is saddled with is intended to lay off any gaucheness the idea of a Rye Whiskey Punch might yet retain onto America’s northern neighbor or if it’s a reflection of the drink’s true origins and of Canada’s characteristic unpretentiousness and good sense. In either case, this is a dangerously alluring Punch, smooth, lightly fruity and endowed with uncommon powers of intoxication.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
2 quarts of rye whiskey.
1 pint of Jamaica rum.
6 lemons, sliced.
1 pineapple, sliced.
4 quarts of water.
Sweeten to taste, and ice.
SOURCE: Jerry Thomas, Bar-Tenders Guide, 1862
SUGGESTED PROCEDURE
Infuse the lemons and the pineapple in the spirits for six hours without squeezing. Dissolve 12 ounces white sugar in 12 cups water, add the spirits—complete with fruit—and the rest of the water, refrigerate for a couple of hours, slip in a large block of ice and serve.
NOTES
The anonymous 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual suggests a couple more lemons in this, and it’s right. For the rye, by no means use Canadian whiskey unless it’s explicitly labeled as a rye. The Canadian whiskey of today and the Canadian whiskey of 1862 are two very different things. It should be, if possible, cask strength; if not, add another 750-milliliter bottle of whiskey and dock the water by 3 cups. The rum should be one of the strong, aromatic members of the Pirate Juice class. A nice variation is to replace the final flood of water with soda or mineral water, in which case it will have to be added just before serving.
THE SPREAD EAGLE PUNCH
The Spread Eagle was of course the icon of the United States of America. It was also a stockjobber’s term, going “spread eagle” on a stock being the same as buying it on margin. Jerry Thomas (whose recipe this is) being both a red-blooded American patriot and a degenerate stock-plunger, he was doubtless aware of both meanings and probably saw the irony there—what could be more American than going out on a long limb in the hope of getting something for nothing?
Just why either one should be commemorated by a mixture of Scotch and American whiskeys, I don’t know; the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual has a “Bird of Freedom Punch” that combines Monongahela rye and New England rum (in a proportion of ten to one), which makes more sense (although some might call it a Canadian Punch). Yet this makes a better Punch. I can’t say why it works, but it does. Mysteriously tasty.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
1 bottle of Islay whiskey.
1 bottle of Monongahela.
Lemon peel, sugar and—boiling water at discretion.
SOURCE: Jerry Thomas, Bar-Tenders Guide, 1862
SUGGESTED PROCEDURE
Follow the steps for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch (page 190), but double all quantities.
NOTES
As long as you’re using a nice Islay malt (go for one of the less peaty ones here, or it will be all you taste; Bruichladdich works splendidly), you should try to match it with a good
Monongahela—although nowadays the rye that was once made on the banks of that river is now made on the banks of the Kentucky and the Ohio. As always, the Rittenhouse Bonded is recommended.
As for that “discretion”: to me, it suggests following the directions for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch—thus, doubled, the peel of two lemons, at least 4 ounces demerara sugar and 3 quarts boiling water.
Personally, I like this one cold, so I make it the day before and serve it with a block of ice. And
I have been known to double or even triple the amount of lemon peel.
YIELD: up to 18 cups.
XV
GIN PUNCH
Gin Punch” is a combination of words that would have struck Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries not unlike the way “Crack Martini” strikes us today. King William’s laudable attempt to strengthen English farmers hadn’t turned out quite the way he planned. I won’t get into the Gin Craze here; books have been written about it, and good ones (see, for example, Patrick Dillon’s Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva). Suffice it to say that by the second decade of the eighteenth century, “geneva” (the English mangling of the Dutch jenever), or “gin” for short, had become the intoxicant of choice—or rather, of necessity—for the scrabbling urban masses, just as destructive as crack but far more widely used. In this case, the Repression stage was fully warranted. A locally distilled knockoff of Dutch genever, geneva was nothing more than raw pot-still whiskey infused with something to hide the “nauseous,” “gross” and “fetid” taste of the grain. The most conscientious distillers would use juniper berries for this, as did the Dutch. Everyone else used turpentine. The only thing to recommend it was its price: when arrack cost eighteen shillings a gallon, gin cost two.
Thus, the ludicrousness of “Gin Punch.” Punch was high-church, gin the lowest of the low. And indeed, most gin-drinkers avoided the odious comparison by guzzling it in straight drams or, at best, tipping it into a mug of ale. But mixology is no respecter of boundaries, and by the 1730s, we start to see people making Punch with gin. Admittedly, they were not people of the best class: escaped convicts, Grub Street writers, Americans and the like. The Fortunate Imposter, an anonymous 1759 novel, locates it perfectly when it has its hero share a “twelve-penny bowl of hot Gin-Punch” with a “club of beggars.” But the eighteenth century was a time of change, and as we have seen demonstrated so often in the story of Punch, time has a way of reconciling opposites. By the last quarter of the century, Gin Punch had ceased to be oxymoronic and had won a foothold in the citadel of acceptable drinks. It helped that with the Gin Craze having burned itself out, the hundreds upon hundreds of backroom distillers operating in the 1730s had been winnowed down to a much smaller number of large, technologically sophisticated players who made a product such that people could see good qualities in it other than cheapness. Indeed, the quality of the spirit had improved so much that some doctors took advantage of the widely touted diuretic properties of the juniper berry and prescribed Gin Punch to their patients. Another sign of progress: in 1776, James Boswell, then a respectable attorney, wrote in his diary, “I drank rather too much gin punch. It was a new liquor to me, and I liked it much.”
Yet while Gin Punch was gaining acceptance, it was a tentative acceptance, and a conditional one. In part, it depended on what you powered it with. If by “gin” you meant the best grades of imported Hollands, the kind that often sold for the same price as old cognac, most were willing to overlook its lack of pedigree. If, though, it was English gin you were talking about, which sold at a third to half the price, it might be of acceptable quality for medical use, but it was simply not genteel.
It is, however, an interesting phenomenon of English social history that the highest reaches of society often find ways to come together with the lowest against the middle ones, and Regency London was no exception. Slumming in low-class “gin palaces” was a popular diversion for the “Fancy”—those fashionable young sparks who devoted their leisure hours to cultivating pugilists and jockeys and betting on the results of their protégés’ labors. The tastes they acquired in such establishments as the “sluicery,” to which the aristocratic Corinthian Tom takes his equally well-bred friend Jerry Hawthorne in Pierce Egan’s 1821 sporting-life classic Life in London—a nasty dive populated by broken-down old whores, street urchins and gin-soaked beggars—followed them to their more characteristic haunts: the club, the coffeehouse, the officers’ mess. Even the most respectable inns at which the Fancy congregated, such as the ancient Blue Posts, learned to pride themselves on their Gin Punch. If there were still those agreeing with the young dandy caricatured in the New Monthly Magazine who pronounced Gin Punch “Vastly vulgar,” Lord Byron, the most glamorous figure of his age, was not among them: according to his mistress, he wrote the last Cantos of Don Juan “with repeated glasses of Gin Punch at his side.”
Up to this point—broadly, the last decade of the Georgian era, which ended with the death of George IV in 1830—Gin Punch, alias “Gin Twist,”bb was made in the conventional manner: if cold, it took its ration of lemon juice, sugar and water much like any other; if hot, we can assume that it would have followed the trend with hot Punches in general and used the peel of the lemon but not its juice. In the 1830s, however, mixology kicked in with the introduction and immediate acceptance of the Garrick Club’s take on the drink. When streamlined and downsized, this would become the John and then the Tom Collins, the drink that made gin an acceptable drink for the middle classes.
Here are three respectable ways of ginning.
HOLLAND GIN PUNCH
The perceived vulgarity of Gin Punch ensured that nothing like a recipe for it appeared during the eighteenth century, or if it did, it was tucked away so safely that I have been unable to find it. However, the sparse notices we do have for it give no indication that any extraordinary procedure was followed in its concoction.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
For Cold Holland Gin Punch, use the recipe for Major Bird’s Brandy Punch, with the substitution of a good corenwijn or oude genever (a category that includes the grey-bottle Bols Genever) for the cognac.
For Hot Holland Gin Punch, use the recipe for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch, with the same substitution for the usquebaugh.
SOURCE: The sources for early Gin Punch are so nebulous when it comes to details that they are not worth citing. Here, one must proceed by extrapolation.
NOTES
The American comedian Howard Paul left a detailed description of Charles Dickens’s procedure in manufacturing hot Punch from “old gin” (which could be either Dutch or English; Dickens kept both in his cellar), “lumps of sugar” and “chips of lemon.” Here Dickens omitted the flames found in the recipe he gave his friends, but he still made sure that “the mouth of the jug was closed by stuffing in the napkin, rolled up to do duty as a cork” and set by the fire. “And then the illustrious brewer,” Paul concludes, watch in hand, timed the commingling of the work of his hand. In about six minutes the precious brew was ready to be reverently quaffed, and as he handed me, with a smile, a full tumbler, he kept his eye on my face, as if to watch my first impression.
Howard Paul was a lucky man.
GARRICK CLUB PUNCH
In a little series of meditations on various matters he published in 1835 as The Original, the English essayist Thomas Walker mentioned in passing how gratifying iced Punch was in summer. This prompted a substantial digression by the London Quarterly’s reviewer, to whom the world owes a debt of thanks. “Instead of icing punch,” the reviewer writes, “the preferable mode is to mix it with a proportion of iced soda-water.” And then he’s off, touching on the Garrick Club—whose “gin punch . . . is one of the best things we know”; on Stephen Price, the club’s American manager; on Thomas Hill, who was some sort of celebrity; and finally on Theodore Hook, one of the novelists and wits of the day and a man who was known to step high, wide and handsome in matters tipicular (he was Coleridge’s partner-in-crime, you may recall, at their glass-smashing Punch party near Highgate). Hook, it seems, popped into the Garrick one warm afternoon “in that equivocal state of thirstiness which it requires something more than common to quench.” He made his thirst known, and a recommendation was made: try the Gin Punch. He did. A jug was made “under the personal inspection of Mr. Price.” He drank it. Five more were made, one after the other. He drank them, too. Then he shoved off under his own steam and made it to his dinner appointment. Let’s see Jonathan Franzen pull that
off.
We should focus on Mr. Price for a moment. He was an American, born the year England signed the colonies away. In 1808, the twenty-five-year-old Price was put in charge of running the Park Theatre in New York, the city’s most fashionable theater. He would run it for the next eighteen years. Price was a betting man his whole life, a member in good standing of the so-called Sporting Fraternity. One of his most successful gambles was to import English actors to the New York stage at a time when Anglophobia ran high and loud (he began with the Whiskey Punch-loving Cooke). In 1826, after a most successful run, he decamped for London to take over the management of the renowned Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. There, he was less successful, lasting only two years. In 1831, though, when some well-funded theatrical types started the Garrick Club, they made him its manager. That’s surprising. It’s not just that, according to one who knew him, he was “not a highly educated man, nor the possessor of a very refined taste” or that he “unsparingly larded his conversation” with “coarse and highly objectionable epithets.” He was also prickly, shrewd, brusque and imperious, to the point that Thackeray (a member) caricatured him in his Book of Snobs as the beastly “Captain Shindy.” Hardly Garrick material, one would think.
On the other hand, he knew a trick with Gin Punch. In New York, he was so famous for drinking “gin and water” while complaining that “the glasses were too small and he had to fill them too often” that the tragedian James William Wallack eventually presented him with a special goblet that held over a quart. The H2O in that “gin and water” probably wasn’t the kind that just sits there. His Punch recipe, you see, which the humanitarian from the Quarterly was good enough to print, calls for “iced soda water.” This was something new: while people had been experimenting with carbonated water and Punch since the 1780s, and iced Punch was by that point held in high regard, nobody seems to have put them together before (indeed soda water, a popular hangover cure, was seen as an antidote to Punch, not an accomplice).
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