Punch
Page 20
We don’t know if Price brought his formula with him from New York, but it’s a good guess,bc what with the American proclivity for iced drinks. Whoever first concocted it, it was a sensation: once outed in the popular Quarterly, it spread pretty much everywhere. And with good reason: Price’s formula is utterly seductive, a bright, vastly refreshing tipple that bridges the gap between Punch and the modern long drink. Price himself didn’t live to enjoy the acclaim he deserved: he was back in New York by 1838 and died two years later, but it would be another two decades before his innovation really caught on in his hometown, and then it would bear another man’s name.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
Pour half a pint of gin on the outer peel of a lemon, then a little lemon juice, sugar, a glass of maraschino, about a pint and a quarter of water, and two bottles of iced soda water. The result will be three pints of the punch in question.
SOURCE: London Quarterly, 1835
NOTES
That “gin” could mean either a Hollands or an Old Tom. I lean toward a Hollands, what with Price being a New Yorker and that being the gin in favor there, but then again Price was an Anglophile and, more importantly, by 1835 English gin was well on its way to dominance in the domestic market, despite a few dissenting voices. Either way, it’s a damn tasty drink. (If you do go with Hollands, use an oude or the Bols Genever, not a corenwijn or jonge). The quantities here require a little precision wrangling. For the gin, you’ll need 10 ounces (remember, we’re dealing with imperial quantities here). “A little lemon juice” is awfully vague; we’ll get back to it in a minute. A glass—presumably a wineglass—of maraschino gives us another 2 ounces. A pint and a quarter of water comes to 25 ounces. Soda water bottles came in two sizes, 6 ounces and the more common 10 ounces; assuming the latter, two of those gives us another (imperial) pint. Total so far: 57 ounces, or 3 ounces shy of 3 imperial pints. So the lemon juice? Three ounces. Sugar? One ounce, more or less, of superfine will do. The London Quarterly be damned, I like a block of ice in mine, so I generally remove 10 to 15 ounces of the water to account for that and switch the rest to soda water—thus ending up with a quart of chilled soda providing the entire H2O content of the drink.
In any case, it’s best to begin by lightly muddling the lemon peel in the sugar and maraschino, and then add the gin and the water. Stir, add the ice if you’re using it and pour in the soda water. Done.
YIELD: 7½ cups.
In his 1868 Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, William Terrington printed eight recipes for Gin Punch, including this one and three simple variations on it, the best of which is “Gin Punch a la Terrington,” for which simply replace the maraschino with green Chartreuse. Indeed, many liqueurs can be substituted successfully for the maraschino here, with interesting results—or try, as Arnold James Cooley suggested in his 1846 recipe “cyclopaedia,” a glass—2 ounces—of sherry (anything but a fino or Manzanilla). I also like to make it with green tea in place of half the soda water—so an American pint of each to 10 ounces gin, plus ice.
LIMMER’S GIN PUNCH
Limmer’s Hotel. Where does one begin? In its heyday, which ran from about 1810 to 1850, this narrow old building at the corner of St. George and Conduit streets, just south of Hanover Square, was one of the hottest spots in London. Not everyone went there: it was chiefly a “resort for the sporting world . . . where you heard nothing but the language of the turf, and where men with not very clean hands used to make up their books,” as Captain Gronow, the one-man archive of Regency and late-Georgian gossip, later recalled. Evidently the bookies rather set the tone for Limmer’s standards of hygiene: according to Gronow, it was “the most dirty hotel in London.” No matter; the clientele was frighteningly aristocratic—Byron was a regular, along with half the upper reaches of the army—and couldn’t care less about such bourgeois values as cleanliness or comfort. The rooms were small, dark and unswept. The “coffee-room”—that is, the bar—was “gloomy.” Its clock was the frequent target of the patrons’ late-night pistol practice. The doorman had one leg. There was no closing time. That kind of place.
As long as the action was hot and the establishment kept the nouveaux riches and tradesmen out, which it did with an enthusiasm bordering on cruelty, it could count on upper-crust patronage. Particularly if John Collins (or Collin—accounts differ), the hotel’s plump, cheerful yet dignified old headwaiter, was at hand to fetch a brimming glass of its famous Punch, which was based not on arrack, rum or brandy, or whiskey, but on “blue ruin”—gin.
I’ve written about Mr. Collins in Imbibe! and about the chilled, carbonated glasses of Gin Punch that traveled the world under his name. I’ll concentrate here on what Mr. Collins was actually serving at Limmer’s. This task is complicated somewhat by the fact that Collins seems to have known more than one way to make Punch, to judge by the compounds he’s pushing in the brief sketches of him penned by his contemporaries. If he’s offering “Sir Godfrey’s mixture” to one, to another it’s “Mr. Wombwell’s mixture” and to yet another “the Prince of Wales’ mixture,” while a fourth is calling him “that elaborate compounder of whisky punch.” About these we know nothing (well, the penultimate one is probably Regent’s Punch, for which see Chapter XVII).
Everyone else, however, liked the Gin Punch, and indeed that’s the mixture that ended up being associated with him. Unfortunately, authentic notices of it are surprisingly scarce, and it’s difficult to pin down when he perfected it. Indeed, the composition of Mr. Collins’s Gin Punch is one of the enduring mysteries of mixological history: was it the same as the bar drink that bore his name? Just gin, lemon juice and sugar, with soda water and ice? If so, what kind of gin was it? Most American bartenders, anyway, made it with Holland gin; we don’t know what the English ones did, since they didn’t write about it. Holland gin was certainly prized in England, often fetching the same kinds of prices that old cognac did.
There are, however, a couple of hints found in the press of the day that, combined with what we know about John Collinses and Gin Punch, might help us to resurrect it. What follows is of necessity rather close-grained, and since reading it is by no means necessary to the enjoyment of what proves itself to be one of the most delightful drinks ever concocted, a light, floral Punch that makes even the Garrick’s seem coarse in comparison, if you are thirsty, I suggest you skip ahead.
One thing we can conclude is that the gin it was based on was in fact English. That deduction comes from “Wine, a Tale,” a slight piece of fiction written by the prolific and then-popular novelist Catherine Gore, which appeared anonymously in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1833; in it the narrator, a junior officer in the navy, finds himself at the officers’ mess of one of Her Majesty’s regiments in the eastern Mediterranean. The company is sporty, the talk knowing, and soon “proposals” are made “for a bowl of ‘Gin-Punch!’” One of the lieutenants, who happens to be both a lord and “a masterhand in the scientific brew,” takes charge. The necessaries are assembled: Punch bowl, lemons, the usual. Then the spirits: “a bottle of Hodges’ best . . . appeared in as orderly array as though we had been supping at Limmer’s.”
Mrs. Gore can be counted on to have gotten her details right, the behavior of the privileged being her bread and butter. She got her gin right, anyway, “Hodges full proof” being one of the dominant brands of the period, and one of the pioneering Old Tom gins—indeed, the category might have been named after Tom Chamberlain, Hodges’s master distiller; so said Notes & Queries, anyway. The other key to Limmer’s Gin Punch comes from an 1836 piece in the New Sporting Magazine titled “The Ascot Cup.” It opens with a what-ho coterie of oh-so-fast Oxford boys discussing the races over “a huge jug of iced punch.” On the table are bottles of “brandy, rum, gin, whiskey, Hollands &c.” and “one large bottle of Capillaire.” In its original French form, this was a syrup thickened with an infusion of maidenhair fern. In English hands, it was usually no more than a thick sugar syrup flavored lightly with orange-flower water. English or
French, to our author its presence denotes “the experience of the worthy host with respect to the mysteries of Honest John Collins.”
So. Is the original Limmer’s Gin Punch nothing more than an Old Tom Punch, sweetened with capillaire and chilled with iced soda water? If it is, it goes a long way toward explaining the affection that Mr. Collins elicited from his regulars.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
Proceed as for the Garrick Club Punch, but with Old Tom gin and using capillaire instead of the maraschino.
NOTES
To make capillaire (English style): stir 2 cups white sugar together with 1 cup water over low heat until sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat, add ⅛ ounce orange-flower water (the Lebanese Mymouné brand, available in Middle Eastern groceries, is excellent), stir and let cool. Bottle and keep refrigerated.
XVI
OXFORD PUNCH
People who spend a lot of time making drinks, whether for love or money, have a distinct tendency to get caught up in the idea of what I like to call “the mixologist’s stone”—that one, talismanic extra ingredient that, when added to a drink, will transform it from adequate to ambrosial. The brine in the Martini, the maraschino-cherry yuck in the Manhattan, the Budweiser in the Margarita. The more unlikely the better. With it, the drink is perfect; without it, deformed. (For that matter, it doesn’t even have to be an ingredient: it can be a technique (the “dry shake”) or a tool or a size or shape of ice cube.) Punch-makers were no different. As the Punch Age progressed, the list of fetishized additions grew. Wine and milk and tea and porter, we’ve already seen. More than a few insisted on guava jelly. Others claimed a little butter in a jug of hot Punch was the very thing. One odd soul even insisted that you couldn’t make good Punch unless you used water that had had rice boiled in it. While I suspect that most of these innovations were attempts to mitigate the consequences of using liquors of less than the first quality (a common theme underlying much mixological experimentation), they were nevertheless not unsuccessful. The Punches they produced were perfectly palatable, and often enough a good deal more than that (okay, I’m still wondering about the rice water). Yet mixologists did not rest. Mankind, after all, is curious and determined and will stride swingingly toward its own destruction.
Case in point: sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, one of the anonymous, unheralded geniuses that the mixological art throws off in such profusion took the bold step of adding calf’s-foot jelly—basically, gelatin—to a ration of Punch, with the idea that (as an 1845 cookbook put it) “the jelly softens the mixture, and destroys the acrimony of the acid and sugar.” It does. In fact, there is no drink in the pharmacopoeia more unctuous, more perfectly smooth and innocuous-seeming than Punch made thus. In my mind, it occupies a shelf in the same compartment that holds the rapier, the Colt revolver, the common house cat and the German Panther tank. It is a perfect killing machine. Here are two ways of letting it loose.
OXFORD PUNCH
In 1827, an Oxford printer put out a little paperback pamphlet titled Oxford Night Caps, being a Collection of Receipts for making Various Beverages used in the University. Only thirty-four pages long, with forty “receipts,” it was the first book ever published devoted entirely to mixed drinks. Its authorship has been attributed to one Richard Cook, born 1799, about whom I have been able to find nothing amusing or interesting. Whoever he was, Cook was an educated man, or at least good at faking it: the book omitted none of the footnotes, classical allusions and scraps of Greek and Latin then obligatory for a work of convivial literature. As with Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tenders Guide, for which it would to some degree serve as a model, the drinks it presented were a motley mix of the archaic and the up-to-date. Metheglin and Sack-Posset are included, but so are a number of the wine-based Cups that were beginning to replace Punch in polite society.
Yet there are also thirteen recipes for Punch, including this one. A glance at the formula reveals that this is no Sir-Tobyby-the-Fireside Punch, nothing that a country gent could whip up on the sideboard while talking dogs and horses with the squire from down the road. Where does one start? Along with Regent’s Punch and Boston Club Punch, this is one of the most complicated recipes in this book. But anything drunk at Oxford in the glory days of mandatory Greek and Latin has got to be worth preserving. And who knows? One day, you might just have an occasion so special, a guest so honored, an anniversary so long in coming, that no ordinary drink will do. Anyone can spend money, but to assemble something like this, another of the high peaks of the Punchmaker’s art, speaks of true love. (If you do make it, the gamesman in me suggests you display the recipe on a placard by the Punch bowl to, uh, satisfy the curious.)
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
Extract the juice from the rind of three lemons, by rubbing loaf sugar on them. The peeling of two Seville oranges and two lemons, cut extremely thin. The juice of four Seville oranges and ten lemons. Six glasses of calves-foot jelly in a liquid state. The above to be put into a jug, and stirred well together. Pour two quarts of boiling water on the mixture, cover the jug closely, and place it near the fire for a quarter of an hour. Then strain the liquid through a sieve into a punch bowl or jug, sweeten it with a bottle of capillaire, and add half a pint of white wine, a pint of French brandy, a pint of Jamaica rum, and a bottle of orange shrub; the mixture to be stirred as the spirits are poured in. If not sufficiently sweet, add loaf sugar gradually in small quantities, or a spoonful or two of capillaire. To be served either hot or cold.* The Oxford Punch, when made with half the quantity of spirituous liquors and placed in an ice tub for a short time, is a pleasant summer beverage.
In making this Punch, limes are sometimes used instead of lemons, but they are by no means so wholesome.**
* Ignorant servants and waiters sometimes put oxalic acid into Punch to give it flavour; such a practice cannot be too severely censured.
** Arbuthnot, in his work on ailments, says “the West India dry gripes are occasioned by lime juice in Punch.”
SOURCE: [Richard Cook], Oxford Night Caps, 1827
NOTES
With one or two modifications, the basic procedure here is sound. Begin with an oleo-saccharum of five lemons, two Seville oranges and ½ cup white sugar; don’t worry about including the peels in the initial jugging of the jelly and the juices—their work is done, and they may be discarded. For the jelly, mix two ¼-ounce packets of gelatin, bloomed in ½ cup cold water as directed on the packet, with 2 cups warm water, and use this in place of the “six [wine-]glasses” the recipe calls for. The wine can be anything, really, as long as it’s French, white and reasonably dry. The brandy should be VSOP cognac—again, this is not an everyday recipe—and the rum a Planter’s Best type or better. For the capillaire, see Limmer’s Gin Punch, in Chapter XV. Clément, the makers of a very fine Martinique rhum agricole, also make and export a very fine orange shrub, which is nothing more than their rum infused with orange peels and a few subtle spices and sweetened with cane syrup; use 16 ounces of that and 8 ounces water. (If you can’t find that, make an orange shrub by preparing an oleo-saccharum of 8 ounces demerara sugar and the peel of four Seville oranges, dissolving it in 8 ounces boiling water, adding 12 ounces VS-grade cognac and straining and bottling the result.) These last two ingredients should be added to taste. Remember that the pints here are probably 20-ounce imperial ones (the book came out only a year after the new measures were adopted, so it could go either way). When this is mixed, it should be bottled and promptly refrigerated. If serving it cold, you don’t want to spoil the texture by adding ice.
The general quantity here amounts to a little less than a gallon and a half of liquid if Cook was using wine measure, or a little more if they were imperial. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of assembling the ingredients, I suggest you double or triple the recipe and really do it up.
YIELD: at least 22 cups.
PUNCH JELLY
As Gary Regan observes in his modern classic The Joy of Mixology, Jell-O shots, althou
gh “looked upon by most people as an abomination created by young bartenders in the 1980s, . . . actually date back to at least the mid-1800s.” An extension of an Oxford-style Punch with enough gelatin added to make it completely jellify, if that’s a word, jellied Punch starts turning up in recipe books in the 1830s, although it may be rather older than that. While more of a curiosity than a full-fledged, working drink, it does have its conceivable uses. As Jerry Thomas noted in 1862, “This preparation is a very agreeable refreshment on a cold night.” Careful, though: the professor also very rightly warns that it be used in moderation, as “the strength of the punch is so artfully concealed by its admixture with the gelatine, that many persons, particularly of the softer sex, have been tempted to partake so plentifully of it as to render them somewhat unfit for waltzing or quadrilling after supper.” I would be particularly wary of the quadrilling.
THE ORIGINAL FORMULA
Make a good bowl of punch. . . . To every pint of punch add an ounce and a half of isinglass, dissolved in a quarter pint of water (about half a tumbler full); pour this into the punch whilst still quite hot, and then fill your moulds, taking care they are not disturbed until the jelly is completely set.