Punch

by David Wondrich

  REGENT’S PUNCH

  There’s something about the title that drives men a little off the rails. Prince of Wales. It sounds like you’re really in charge of something, but in point of fact you’re not. Your whole job is to wait until your father—or mother—either dies or becomes too feeble to wear the crown, and until then you will be eyed with deep suspicion by that parent and all who are allied to him or her. At the same time, you will be surrounded by people who will do everything in their power to make sure you get anything you want, with the expectation that one day they will be the ones giving some future Prince of Wales the fish-eye. It’s a hell of a job. Some hold up pretty well; others are like George Augustus Frederick, first son of George III.

  Sure, it couldn’t have helped his disposition any that his father kept going mad, only to snap back into a precarious sanity just when it looked like the prince would get all the cake. Nobody likes to be teased. But did the prince have to be such a swine? The bigamy, the gluttony, the alcoholism, the pettiness and intrigue—an account of the Regency, when they finally let him run things in his father’s place, and his later reign as George IV makes for pretty gamy reading. He did, though, have one redeeming quality: he had taste. He was unusually sound on art, on poetry, on architecture (although his rococo oriental-themed “Pavilion” at Brighton was a bit of a misstep), not so much on women, but definitely on food and drink. He knew his wines. He knew his brandies. And he definitely knew his Punches.

  Regent’s Punch, the formula he had made for himself and his guests on social occasions, was, as one might expect, on the elaborate side. Rather than the canonical five ingredients, it had ten. But while it was as rich and luxurious as one could imagine, it was also balanced and lively. Once people tried it, they wanted more—sometimes to their detriment. The formula’s drawbacks were already well known in 1818, three years after it first appears in print. A satirical 1818 London “Diary of a Dandy” summarizes them neatly: “Saturday—rose at twelve, with a d——d headache. Mem. Not to drink the Regent’s Punch after supper.—The green tea keeps one awake.”

  Unfortunately for the mixographer, with all “the mad delirious dizziness which follows the delightful excitation of mingled Champagne, green tea, and Eau de Garusse, in the Regent’s punch,” as John Gibson Lockhart quite accurately described its effects, nobody remembered to record for posterity the moment of the Punch’s creation (and no, I don’t know what “Eau de Garusse” is either). Captain Gronow recalled that the Punch was “made from a recipe by his maitre d’hotel, Mr Maddison,” but it’s possible that the prince regent himself had a hand in it; he was known to meddle with his potables.

  Whoever invented it knew what he was about, although Regent’s Punch was not groundbreaking per se, if one may speak of a mixed drink in such terms. The combination of arrack and tea dated to the reign of the prince’s grandfather or great-grandfather, if not all the way back to East India Company days,be and it was in fact standard in the version of Punch that was causing such a sensation in Paris. The use of liqueurs and syrups was another Parisian limonadier’s specialty. What Regent’s Punch contributes to the art of mixing drinks isn’t novelty, it’s taste. Whoever first compounded it took the best ideas of the old English and new French traditions and wove them together seamlessly into a complex, admittedly fancy Punch that was nonetheless heady and utterly intoxicating, without any of the technical challenges of Punch à la Romaine. It is another of the noble few that will be found relaxing in elegant leisure on Punch’s version of Olympus.

  Before long, like most appurtenances of the British high life, Regent’s Punch was in common use in New York. Edgar Allan Poe’s Gentleman’s Magazine observed in 1839 that it was “long the fashionable tipple at the symposiums of the elite,” and that was true whichever side of the Atlantic you were on. It didn’t hurt that the Yankees had a Tory streak a mile wide and lapped up the royals and their doings like Devonshire cream.

  Regent’s Punch maintained some presence in the consciousness of the elegant drinker through the end of the century, making it into a number of the more modern bar guides, if by no means all. But even then, the formulae were degenerate, and like most drinks of its size and complexity, it quietly expired sometime between the Wright Brothers and Sarajevo. Oddly enough, one of its last redoubts was Albany, New York, where it was the traditional banquet-tipple of the state legislature. (Those were the days.)

  The recipes for Regent’s Punch are many and varied, a situation in which authenticity is difficult to establish. Fortunately, there are two that each have what is known in Qur’anic studies as an “isnad,” a chain of oral transmission linking them to the Prophet, or in this case the Prince. One of them comes from William Terrington’s 1869 Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, in which Terrington labels it “original.” As he credits it to “P. Watier, Royal Lodge, 1820” and a Watier—J.-B., not P., but you can’t have everything—had in fact been the prince’s private chef and had for a time run a gambling club with a Madison (he was listed then as the prince’s page, not maître d’hôtel), he may very well be correct. The other was published in 1845, in Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton, who says she got it from “a person who made the punch daily for the prince’s table, at Carlton palace, for six months” and that “it . . . may be relied on.” Between these, which differ only in detail, we’re about as close as mixology gets to a certified pedigree. Rather than my usual procedure, I’ll recognize Regent’s Punch as a special case and present both, followed by my attempt to harmonize them.

  ORIGINAL FORMULA #1

  Punch à la Regent, by P. Watier, Royal Lodge, 1820: original.

  —Take 4 oz. of clarified sugar, thin peel of 1 lemon and 1 Seville orange, 1 bottle of dry Champagne, ½ bottle of white brandy, ½ gill of rum, ½ gill of arrack, ½ gill of pineapple syrup, 1 wine-glass of Maraschino; pour 1 quart of boiling water over 2 teaspoonfuls of green tea; let it stand five minutes; strain, and mix with other ingredients; pass through a sieve; let it remain in ice 30 minutes.

  SOURCE: William J. Terrington, Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, 1869

  ORIGINAL FORMULA #2

  The Regent’s, or George The Fourth’s, Punch.

  Pare as thin as possible the rinds of two China oranges, of two lemons, and of one Seville orange, and infuse them for an hour in half a pint of thin cold syrup; then add to them the juice of the fruit. Make a pint of strong green tea, sweeten it well with fine sugar, and when it is quite cold, add it to the fruit and syrup, with a glass of the best old Jamaica rum, a glass of brandy, one of arrack, one of pine-apple syrup, and two bottles of Champagne; pass the whole through a fine lawn sieve until it is perfectly clear, then bottle and put it into ice until dinner is served. We are indebted for this receipt to a person who made the punch daily for the prince’s table, at Carlton palace, for six months; it has been in our possession some years, and may be relied on.

  SOURCE: Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families, 1845

  When all is considered and thoroughly digested, we end up with something like this:

  SUGGESTED PROCEDURE

  Prepare an oleo-saccharum of the peel of two lemons, two small sweet oranges, one Seville orange and 4 ounces white sugar.

  Make 1 pint green tea (using two tea bags or 2 teaspoons of loose tea). Let it steep five minutes and then strain it into the bowl with the oleo-saccharum, stirring until the sugar has dissolved.

  Juice the lemons and the oranges into the bowl, stir well and then strain everything into a sealable gallon jug, pressing the peels and pulp well to extract every drop of essence.

  Add 8 ounces VSOP-grade cognac, 2 ounces Jamaican rum, 2 ounces Batavia arrack and 2 ounces maraschino liqueur or pineapple syrup.

  Cover the jug and refrigerate for an hour or two.

  To serve, pour into a bowl and gently stir in two bottles of brut Champagne. Your punch is completed. Now smile.

  NOTES

  Terrington’s “white brandy” is made only by Henne
ssy these days, and it is only available in France or in duty-free shops; if adventurous, you might want to try a good, smooth pisco. For the rum, we must assume that the prince had access to the oldest, mellowest London dock Jamaica; I like a mix of one part Smith & Cross and three parts of the nectarous Angostura 1919—here the rum must be suave as well as fragrant. If using maraschino, use Luxardo (the prince loved maraschino). The easiest way to make pineapple syrup is to prepare a rich simple syrup by stirring 4 cups demerara sugar into 2 cups water over low heat until the sugar is dissolved, letting this syrup cool, adding a pineapple cut up into half-inch chunks and letting it sit overnight. When strained, it will keep refrigerated for at least a week. If this Punch looks like it will be sitting around for a while, it’s a good idea to refrigerate the bowl, or at least add a large block of ice. The historical record holds a great many variations, but many of them bear the marks of economy or expediency and can therefore be ignored. One ingredient that does come up early and often is “bloom raisins,” which were made from sweet grapes from Málaga, Spain. These are steeped in the Punch and then strained out. Worth a try. Use a pound.

  YIELD: 10 cups.

  XVIII

  AMERICAN FANCY PUNCH

  America’s early contributions to mixology have already been ably detailed by the likes of William Grimes, Gary Regan and Ted Haigh, and I took my own shot at it in Imbibe! In other words, I shall not dwell on them in detail. Besides, America’s greatest innovation in the art of compounding Punch was to greatly extend James Ashley’s work in applying the technologies of miniaturization and just-in-time production to the process, turning it from a large-bore social drink to an on-the-fly statement of individual desire—and, in the process, putting an end to its rule.

  We did do one thing right, anyway. Even the most reactionary English bowl-scourer would have agreed that a tiff of iced Punch on a hot day was a welcome thing. It’s unclear exactly when ice and Punch first met, but it probably happened long before the Tortonis and Mr. Maddisons did their work—England had a small but long-standing tradition of ice-cooled drinks. In 1666, for example, we find Pepys recording that metheglin is a “most brave drink cooled in ice.” In England, however, ice was hard to get and expensive: private icehouses existed on the great estates, but in the metropolis, the water was too dirty and the freezing too spotty to support an extensive industry. In America, though, there was no shortage of ice whatsoever, at least not in New England and what was then the Northwest. Winters were long and cold, and the water was clean. It was only a matter of time that we began using it on a scale that only we could afford.

  John Neal’s satirical 1825 Revolutionary War novel, Brother Jonathan, has someone drinking “ice punch,” but Neal wasn’t born until 1793, and his book contains other imbiblical (to coin a word) anachronisms, so it must be taken with a very large grain of salt. Not so the 1806 advertisement from the New York American Citizen for a new ice company, which includes the (no doubt true) statement that “of latter years the Water in the Collect [the Lower Manhattan pond where ice was normally harvested] has been in a putrid state, to make the Ice unfit to be made use of in Liquors.” This suggests that iced drinks had been in use for some time, and if so, it’s inconceivable that Punch wasn’t among them. At any rate, William Dunlap, in his Thirty Years Ago, or The Memoirs of a Water Drinker (1836), describes young sports at Cato’s tavern drinking “iced punch” from a bowl, right around that same time. This, however, was one of the last appearances of the communal bowl in the wild; soon it would only be found in captivity: in clubhouses, meeting rooms and parlors, not in barrooms, lodgings and mess halls.

  Once we had removed the bowl of Punch from its employment as a day-to-day drink, we started tinkering with it to fit its new role. For one thing, there was less impetus to restrict the strength at which it was brewed; special occasions grant special license. Instead of being artificial wines, American Punches began looking suspiciously like giant Sours, Fizzes and Cocktails. Whatever dilution was desired would come from melting ice, not additions of “the element.” Another thing that goes with special occasions is special ingredients—luxury goods. Our Punches became wholly prismatic affairs, with fantastic assortments of rare liquors and fruits, lightened with Champagne and poured over lavish beds of diamond-pure cracked ice.

  In New York City, the natural consequences of this tinkering were on display for all to see every January first, which was celebrated with the New Year’s call. This was an old Dutch custom whereby gentlemen would go around to all their friends’ houses on New Year’s Day, salute their womenfolk, take a glass from the bowl that decorated the sideboard, and move on to the next. Invariably, with the strength of the Punches served, a significant proportion of the city’s bourgeoisie would be drunk as boiled owls by the end of the day. The custom hung on, albeit somewhat precariously, well into the last half of the nineteenth century.

  For one person, anyway, it would have been better had it died out a little sooner. In 1877, James Gordon Bennett Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, made his last New Year’s call ever at the house of his fiancée, Miss May. It wasn’t his first, or even his tenth, of the day, and for reasons that have never been otherwise explained, he made himself a little too much at home by whipping it out in front of the ladies and pissing into the living-room fireplace—or maybe it was the piano; accounts differ. Three days later, her brother horsewhipped him outside the Union Club. A duel was fought, down in Maryland. Three times they both fired; three times they both missed, perhaps deliberately. Their seconds decided that honor was satisfied, but soon afterward Bennett left for Paris, never to return. The New Year’s call didn’t last much after that—not because of the Bennett affair, although that didn’t help, but because the city was getting just too damned big for drunk people to get around in safety.

  Here are nine quick looks at Punch, American style, any one of which will make for a memorable New Year’s Day.

  PHILADELPHIA FISH-HOUSE PUNCH

  Having written about this, the most enduringly famous of American Punches, in both Esquire Drinks and Imbibe!, I wasn’t planning to do so here. But writing a book about Punch without including it just didn’t feel right. As I was pondering that, a reader of Imbibe! fortuitously sent me a newspaper article she had come across with the oldest recipe for this foundational American drink yet discovered. It dates from 1795, if we are to believe the Philadelphia Telegraph, which found it sandwiched between the leaves of a history of what is now America’s oldest club in the library of a noted local bibliophile. It agrees in every major detail, anyway, with the one Jerry Thomas printed from Charles Godfrey Leland, a Philadelphia lawyer who was a member, or “citizen,” of “the State in Schuylkill,” the Philadelphia fishing club responsible for unleashing it upon the world.

  THE ORIGINAL FORMULA

  An interesting little volume, also, is the Memoirs of the Schuylkill Fishing Club. . . . Many original papers are sandwiched between the leaves, giving accounts of some of the club’s jubilations, and containing a written recipe for punch, as follows:To 1 pint of lemon or lime juice add

  3 pints of mixture given below.

  10 pints of water.

  4 pounds of best loaf sugar.

  When ice is put in use less water.

  THE MIXTURE

  ½ pint Jamaica rum.

  ¼ pint Cognac brandy.

  ¼ pint best peach brandy.

  The receipt is dated 1795.

  SOURCE: Philadelphia Telegraph, 1880

  NOTES

  Begin by dissolving the sugar (1 pound should do, unless you like your Punch very sweet) in the lemon or lime juice (by Leland’s day, lemon had become the orthodox souring). An oleo-saccharum is also not a bad idea here; use the peel of twelve lemons. In Imbibe! I spilled a fair amount of ink lamenting the loss of various old-time ingredients and coming up with kludges to work around their absence. Since then, we have been graced with such revenants as Batavia arrack, Hollands, Old Tom gin, real absinthe, crème d
e violette and one or two others that I’m forgetting. So I will not despair about the loss of peach brandy, an eau-de-vie of peaches distilled on the crushed pits and then left alone to slumber in oaken barrels. For many years, it was the most prized spirit in America, judging from the prices it brought. The last commercial distiller I know of to make it in any quantity was Lem Motlow. If you can’t place the name, consult the label of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He only stopped making it in the 1940s, so who knows, there might be a bottle of it floating around somewhere. Good luck. Or you can keep an eye on the microdistillers. There’s already one version—Kuchan, from California—and it ain’t bad. As for kludges: I like 3 ounces bonded applejack and 1 ounce good, imported peach liqueur. Serve iced; 7 pints of water should be enough.

  YIELD: at least 25 cups.

  QUOIT CLUB PUNCH

  The thirty members of the Richmond, Virginia, Quoit Club, founded in 1788, met every other Saturday from May until October “under the shade of some fine oaks,” as one visitor recalled, at Buchanan’s Spring, right outside of town. There they would throw the heavy, ringlike quoits at posts, eat barbecue and drink themselves silly on Mint Julep, Toddy and this, the club’s Punch, which was prepared with great skill by Jasper Crouch, their black cook.

  The club’s most famous member was one of its founders, John Marshall, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835, the longest tenure in the court’s history. For a great man, Marshall retained a sense of humor. As the story goes, on his watch the court cut down on the convivial tippling that had been such a part of colonial public life to the point that the justices only allowed themselves wine when the weather was wet. But, as Joseph Story, one of his fellow justices, used to recount,it does sometimes happen that the Chief Justice will say to me, when the cloth is removed, “Brother Story, step to the window and see if it does not look like rain.” And if I tell him that the sun is shining brightly, Judge Marshall will sometimes reply, “All the better, for our jurisdiction extends over so large a territory that the doctrine of chances makes it certain that it must be raining somewhere.”