Punch

by David Wondrich

  SOURCE: Jerry Thomas, Bar-Tenders Guide, 1862

  NOTES

  You can turn most any Punch into Punch Jelly, but you’ll have to leave out some of the water, watch the citrus (acid keeps the gelatin from setting, so if it’s a citrusy Punch, try using two-thirds of the normal quantity) and, as Mr. Regan suggests, add more sugar; sugars help the gelatin to set and give it flavor. For the gelatin, the regular calf’s-foot kind works just fine and is a hell of a lot easier to find than isinglass. To incorporate it, for every pint of Punch the original recipe makes, omit 1 cup water from the recipe. Once you have prepared the punch base thus, dissolve as many ¼-ounce packets of gelatin in as many cups of hot water as you have omitted from the recipe (make sure to bloom them first in 2 ounces cold water each), stir to activate and then stir in the Punch. Pour it into a Jell-O mold and refrigerate.

  I’m particularly fond of this when it’s made with the more outré flavors of Punch, such as Islay Scotch or Batavia arrack. A Regent’s Punch jelly, though, is truly divine.

  XVII

  REGENCY PUNCH

  Punch not only tastes good, it’s good for you—specifically, for your intellectual development:There is no stretch of imagination in pouring wine ready made from carafe, or barochio, or flask, into a glass—the operation is merely mechanical; whereas, among us punch drinkers, the necessity of a nightly manufacture of a most intricate kind, calls forth habits of industry and forethought—induces a taste for chemical experiment—improves us in hygrometry, and many other sciences,—to say nothing of the geographical reflections drawn forth by the pressure of the lemon, or the Colonial questions, which press upon every meditative mind on the appearance of white sugar.

  Thus the wits of the Noctes Ambrosianae in 1829. I don’t know if all that chemical experiment and geographical reflection made Punch-makers more intellectual in general, but it certainly did make their Punches more sophisticated. (Their hygrometry must’ve been top-notch, what with all that wrestling with the effects of atmospheric humidity on common loaf sugar.) By the end of the eighteenth century, Punch was evolving along strikingly similar lines to the ones the Cocktail is following today. On the one hand, there were the traditionalists: the arrack-drinkers and the Whiskey Punch men. They took their Punch strong and simple, with no funny business and no corner-cutting when it came to the ingredients, either in quantity or quality (in 1820, one New York tavern was so fanatic about what went into its Punch that it only made it with water from the Thames, imported specially from London; Cocktail geekery is nothing new).

  On the other hand, there were the modernists, the experimenters. They thought nothing of subjecting the venerable old beverage to tropical fruits, liqueurs, fancy syrups, eaux-de-vie, raisins, berries, herbs and vegetables—“punch made of everything which extravagance could invent,” as the decidedly skeptical author of the 1827 novel The Guards put it. To some degree, Punch had always been open to a little monkeying with the spirits, the spice, the acid and the sweetener. But modernist Punch-makers took the prismatic approach we’ve already seen applied on occasion, wherein a single ingredient—for example, the arrack—is treated instead as a subdividable class, and extended it beyond the simple matter of using a combination of brandy and rum for the spirits; lemons and oranges for the souring; nutmeg and cinnamon for the spice; or whey, wine or tea for some of the water. Rather than one or two spirits going into the Punch, there would be three, four, five. The task of sweetening it would be shared by liqueurs and syrups and tropical fruits. Some of those syrups and liqueurs would also do double duty as spices—indeed, more and more emphasis was placed on ingredients that bridged the categories, so that compounding a bowl of Punch became the equivalent of painting a rainbow.

  As a part of this, the new school did something nobody but pirates had done before: they seriously attacked the water—the one native ingredient, the thing without which Punch was simply acidulated booze. In traditional Punch, the water simply lay there, providing dilution and nothing else. That would change. As we’ve seen with Gin Punch, the latest thing was to make that water sparkle, to put it to work. But even that was pedestrian compared to what came next. Why use water at all? Why not replace it with something truly exquisite? Why not use Champagne? Here are four Punches that explore the possibilities enabled by that daring suggestion.

  CHAMPAGNE PUNCH

  For Punch made with Champagne, we must look to the source of that sportiest of wines. The French have long viewed their neighbors across the Channel with the sort of bemused curiosity due to a minor laboratory experiment that has taken an unanticipated turn. They do things over there, and we’re sure they have their reasons, but those are not immediately discernible by rational inquiry. Case in point, the French reaction to Punch: though Frenchmen were among the first to taste it, unlike the Germans or especially the Dutch, they maintained their distance. In 1735, for example, Noël-Antoine Pluche devoted a small section of his Spectacle de la Nature, a series of dialogues on natural history for the edification of the young, to what they were drinking in England. Their “liqueur favorite,” the Prior informs his friends, is “le ponche,” made from “two thirds eau-de-vie and one third water, with sugar, cinnamon, powdered cloves, toasted bread, often egg yolks and milk to thicken it all up.”

  “Eau-de-vie and milk,” says the Chevalier, “there’s a strange assortment!” At this, the Prior very sensibly points out that while they might interrogate the English for the way they mix their drinks, the English do the same to the French for the way they make their “ragouts.”

  Ah, the Count interjects. “But the thing most suspect to me about Punch . . . is the use of the eau-de-vie that’s always its base, and which I consider pernicious.” He has his reasons, which we don’t need to get into. Suffice it for our purposes that they seem to have been shared by the broad run of his countrymen. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did Punch catch on in France. When it did, however, it settled right in. As Louis-Sebastian Mercier wrote in his landmark Tableau de Paris in 1788, “we adopted it before the most recent peace with England [i.e., 1783], and it is naturalized among us and served in the public cafés.” Not, however, in its unaltered form: in Paris, men and women drank and socialized together, and social drinks had to appeal to both. According to Mercier, though, Parisian women initially rejected the new drink because of the “strong breath” that spirits leave. The solution was to make Punch not with spirits but with “vin de Champagne.” Not even the Count could object to that.

  At first, this Champagne Punch was controversial. The author of the 1780 Descriptions des arts et métiers notes with disapproval that “some gourmets, to better waste the good things in life, mix Champagne in with the arrack, half and half.” Waste indeed—in France, Punch was initially a hot drink exclusively. Looking back on that grisly practice, “Turenne,” the pseudonymous author of an 1866 French pamphlet on Punch-making, says, “do not speak to me of people who would heat sparkling wines. In every age there have been idiots and blasphemers.”

  By the time the French rose up and overthrew their kings, queens and courtiers (many of whom were afloat in—if not submerged by—Punch, as the author of a 1785 book of “anecdotes scandaleuses” of Versailles noted), Punch with Champagne appears to have found its footing as a cold drink. Fancy Punches would never be the same; just as gelatin proved to be the ultimate smoothing agent, Champagne was, and still is, the ultimate lightening one.

  In this book, I’ve overused the vocabulary of delight. Here’s yet another occasion where it must be quarried. This recipe for a plain Champagne Punch, unfortified by any spirits, is from New York, not Paris. But it’s from Jerry Thomas, a member of that city’s Sporting Fraternity in the very highest standing, and the world has never known greater devotees of Champagne than the miscellaneous gamblers, actors, politicians, pugilists, writers and other players who made up that crowd. In short, he may be trusted on the subject. This light, fragrant concoction—as close as the classical art gets to the festive
modern food-magazine style of Punch-making—is as pleasing to the palate as it is lovely to the eye.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  Champagne Punch. (Per bottle.)

  1 quart bottle of wine.

  ¼ lb. of sugar.

  1 orange sliced.

  The juice of a lemon.

  3 slices of pine-apple.

  1 wine-glass of raspberry or strawberry syrup. Ornament with fruits in season, and serve in Champagne goblets.

  This can be made in any quantity by observing the proportions of the ingredients as given above. Four bottles of wine make a gallon, and a gallon is generally sufficient for fifteen persons in a mixed party.

  SOURCE: Jerry Thomas, Bar-Tenders Guide, 1862

  NOTES

  Dissolve the sugar—2 ounces will do—in the lemon juice first. Remember that a “wine-glass” is 2 ounces. The fruit slices should be thin. If Jerry Thomas was getting bottles of Champagne that contained a full quart, he was very special indeed; otherwise, they were the kind that were called a quart but held approximately 24 ounces. In other words, just use a normal bottle. Thomas and indeed most everybody making Champagne Punch before the end of the nineteenth century would have used a Champagne that was considerably sweeter than a modern brut. Use the brut anyway. This Punch responds particularly well to being served from a refrigerated bowl. Otherwise, use a large block of ice. Dilution here is neither necessary nor desirable.

  PUNCH À LA ROMAINE, OR ROMAN PUNCH

  Simple Champagne Punch was only the beginning. Once the Parisians decided that they liked Punch, that they liked it with Champagne and that they liked it even better when there was just a little rum, brandy or kirschwasser in there, too, and maybe even a splash of one of the more delicate liqueurs, it didn’t take them long to establish that they liked their Punch best of all when made by Italians, or at the very least with Italian know-how. The Italians in general and Neapolitans and Sicilians in particular had spent generations perfecting the art of making iced sherbets chilled with the snow that lingered year-round in sections of the Italian peninsula’s mountainous spine—delicate, refreshing things that were between water and snow in texture and nectar and ambrosia in flavor. Italian confectioners had been established in Paris since the late 1600s; by the end of the next century, they had plenty of domestic competition, although there was still room for an enterprising young Neapolitan who knew his ice-making.

  It was these “limonadiers,” or lemonade sellers, who provided the first real haven for Punch in Paris. According to Mercier, by 1788 it had become one of their specialties.

  I don’t know who the first person was to cross one of the Italian-style “water-ices,” which were only rarely alcoholic and then lightly so at most, with Champagne Punch, but it was a truly inspired mashup. It wasn’t just a question of temperature: the limonadiers had learned to lighten and smooth out the texture of their ices with beaten-in meringue, and the addition of alcohol did nothing to harm that process.

  The Parisians, anyway, must have believed one of the Italians was responsible for this new hybrid, for they named it Punch à la Romaine—“Roman Punch.”bd In 1808, it was known widely enough for a recipe to be included in a Swedish cookbook. By 1810, Parisian cafés such as the Jardin Turc and Tortoni’s, run by a young Neapolitan, were doing turnaway business in it. Anyone who visited the City of Lights had to try the new Punch. There being no better way to make something fashionable in London than to make it fashionable in Paris, before long Roman Punch was well enough known across the Channel for one satirist to score capital against the notoriously dissipated prince regent by having him exclaim, “Oh Roman Punch! Oh potent Curacoa! / Oh Mareschino! O Mareschino! / Delicious drams!” That was in 1813. It’s possible, however, that the idea of the Punch-flavored water ice came from Italy directly. When Byron found the Venetians chilling their Punch only three years later, he wrote to his friend Thomas Moore that they thought this an English custom—that is, not a French one—and that he would not disabuse them from that notion. Whatever its real origin, though, the English considered it French and argued about it accordingly. For some, it was the height of refinement; for others, of decadence. Whichever it was, everybody knew it—indeed, when one writer snarked on the people of Bath for never having heard of it, as the Album claimed in 1825, “several letters to the editors of the Bath papers have been written, and one long pamphlet, stating that the several authors had very often heard of Punch à la Romaine, though only one asserted that he had ever tasted it.” Ouch.

  Eventually, even the Americans came to learn of Roman Punch, or at least the ones who lived in New York, at which point a Londoner could no longer consider it truly fashionable. On both sides of the Atlantic, it settled into a comfortable existence as the sort of thing that would be laid before a cotillion of respectable people from good families in lieu of alcohol. Recipes multiplied, many straying far indeed from the exacting standards of the Italo-Parisian limonadiers. There are literally dozens from the first half of the nineteenth century, at all levels of complexity and strength. The variation in the latter has much to do, I suspect, with the fact that Jamaican rum is so very alluringly cheaper than French Champagne and enough more potent that if you give people a nice, slushy Punch made with it, sooner or later they’re going to stop worrying that you’re lowballing them on cost-per-guest.

  I’ve provided two recipes: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way comes from P. C. Robert, a French chef and restaurateur (he founded the famous Tourne-Bride, in Romainville, just outside of Paris) who, when he was in the employ of the ambassador to England, must’ve made the stuff on a near-daily basis. The hard way comes from the immortal Charles Ranhofer, for over thirty years the head chef at Delmonico’s, the greatest restaurant America has ever known. And hard it is: Ranhofer was the professional’s professional, and his Punch à la Romaine is not something for a rakish young bachelor to whip together for a whist-party. It sure as hell is impressive, though. Oohs will be oohed, aahs aahed.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA—THE EASY WAY (TRANSLATED)

  Clarify a livre and a half [750 grams] sugar, add the [grated] zest of 2 lemons and 2 Seville oranges and the juice of 8 lemons. Add ½ liter of water to this mixture, pass it through a new, fine strainer and freeze it. Then beat the whites of 3 eggs into stiff peaks, which you will not incorporate into your Punch until the moment of service, adding then a glass of Champagne and a half-glass of rum. The compound being completed, serve this Punch in stemmed glasses.

  SOURCE: P. C. Robert, La grande cuisine simplifiée, 1845 (for the original text, see the appendix)

  NOTES

  Modern sugar doesn’t need clarifying. Stir 3 cups sugar and 1 pint water together over a low heat until sugar has dissolved. A “verre” (see the appendix), or “glass,” was, as far as I can determine, 6 ounces. The rum should actually be a “rhum”—an old agricole one from Martinique (the Rhum J.M VSOP is a particular favorite). To freeze this, you’ll need an ice-cream maker, which will set you back about thirty dollars.

  YIELD: 6 cups.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA—THE HARD WAY

  (3515). Roman Punch (Punch à la Romaine).

  This is made with one quart of lemon water ice (No. 3604) well worked in a freezer packed in ice; add to it a little citron peel or extract; the composition should be put in a rather large freezer to allow two Italian meringue egg-whites (No. 140) to be incorporated; it should first be added slowly in small quantities; working it well with the spatula to have it acquire much lightness, then add two gills of rum and a quarter of a bottleful of Champagne; work it well and detach from the sides of the freezer. The rum should be poured in gradually, as well as any kind of spirits in different punches; continue until sufficient be added to suit the taste. It is almost impossible to designate the exact quantity, that depending on the quality of the ingredients composing the punch; generally, the liquors are only put in just when serving. The punch should be sufficiently liquid to be drank without using spoons and as
soon as served. Serve the punch in upright glasses provided with handles. This is sufficient for twelve persons.

  SOURCE: Charles Ranhofer, The Epicurean, 1893

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  Clearly, this will take a little explication. Let’s take it in steps.

  Step 1: Lemon Water Ice. Prepare an oleo-saccharum with 1½ cups superfine sugar and the peel of four lemons. Stir in 1 cup lemon juice, strain out the peels and add enough water to make 1 quart liquid. Put this in an ice-cream maker (see notes on page 230) and freeze loosely.

  Step 2: Italian Meringue Egg Whites. In a nonreactive bowl, beat two egg whites to stiff peaks; reserve. Put ¾ cup sugar and 3 ounces water in a small pot and bring them to a low boil, stirring frequently, and heat it until it reaches 236-238 degrees F (the “small ball” stage); you’ll need a candy thermometer for this. Pour this syrup in a slow, narrow stream into your egg whites, folding it in as you go. When it is all incorporated, stir some more until all is smooth.

  Step 3: Assembly. Slowly incorporate the egg whites into the water ice while it’s still in the ice-cream maker, stirring gently. Then slowly add 8 ounces rum and 6 to 8 ounces Champagne, also stirring. Your Punch is done. Serve in Champagne coupes.

  NOTES

  For the rum, you’ll want at least a Planter’s Best type, if not a Stiggins’s Delight. Whatever you use, it should be rich and smoooooth.