Spice Islands
Spices
nutmeg
for Punch
sugar
Spirits
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
Stiggins’s Delight
Stills
Story, Joseph
Strauss, Gustave Louis Maurice
Sugar. See also Oleo-saccharum
Sumatra
Summers, Montague
Sweden
Swedish Punch
Sweetness. See also Sugar strength vs.
Swift, Jonathan
Tableau de Paris (Mercier)
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
Tamarinds
Taste
Tea
Teach, Edward (Blackbeard)
Tea Punch
Temperance
Temperature
Tennyson, Lord Alfred
Teonge, Henry
Tequila Punch
Terrington, William
Thackeray
Thirty Years Ago, or The Memoirs of a Water Drinker (Dunlap)
Thomas, Jerry
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Tools
in 1885,
glasses
hydrometer
juicer
ladles
miscellaneous
Punch bowls
Topham, Edward
Tovey, Charles
Trader Joe’s
Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, The (Fielding)
Tryon, Thomas
Turner, Thomas
Ude, Louis Eustache
Unger, Richard
United Service Club
United States Literary Gazette
Valle, Pietro della
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)
Velasco y Tovar, Francisco de
Vernon, Admiral
Victoria (queen)
Vinegar Punch
Vinetum Britannicum (Worlidge)
Vodka
Wales
Walker, Thomas
Wallack, James William
Walsh, Dr.
Ward, Ned
Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot (Higden)
Washington, George
Water. See also Aqua vitae
iced soda water
tea vs.
water/ice
Watier, P. (J.-B.)
Webster, Daniel
Welsh Ambassador, The (Dekker)
West Indies
Wetherburn, Henry
Whiskey
in Scotland
Whiskey Punches
American Whiskey Punch
Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch
Canadian Whiskey Punch
Cold Scotch or Irish Whiskey Punch
Spread Eagle Punch
Whores
Widow Ranter, The (Behn)
Willard, Orsamus
William III of England
William of Orange
Williamson, Thomas
Willoughby, William
Wilmot, John
Wilson, John
Wine. See also Punch Royal
adulteration of
flammability of
French wine ban
hippocras
souring of
Winstanley, William
Wit, Wisdom, and Morals Distilled from Bacchus (Tovey)
Woodall, John
Wooley, Hannah
Worlidge, John
Xenophon
Yarworth, John
Yule, Henry
a I have written the drink’s name with a capital “P,” both to distinguish it from the degenerate compounds that have usurped its name and to indicate that it is a specific class of drink. I have done the same throughout with other classes of drink. I don’t know if this fits the canon of literary English, but it is done thus in drink-writing, and I am a drink-writer.
b If the Punch is cold, the ice will melt as the afternoon or evening drags on; if it’s hot, the alcohol will slowly steam out. Either way, it will weaken over time, in parallel with the drinker’s judgment. This is not a bad thing.
c See Revelation 22:17, which reads in the Vulgate (the Latin Bible used in Europe at the time): “Qui vult accipiat aquam vitae gratis” (rendered in the King James Version as “And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely”). This must have caused no end of hilarity among the Latin-speaking clerks of the day.
d “Geprannten weyn,” another of aqua vitae’s many names.
e The Chinese had a commercial distilling industry as early as the 600s, as Joseph Needham has shown in the book-length subsection of his magisterial Science and Civilization in China devoted to “Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus, Theories and Gifts” (which would be volume V, part 4); however, based on postwar excavations in Pakistan, F. Raymond Allchin has been able to mount a persuasive argument that parts of India had such an industry a good thousand years before that.
f The modern convention is to spell this word with an “e” when it refers to something made in Ireland and the United States and without one when it refers to a Scottish, Canadian or Japanese product. This is a very recent rule, however, for a matter of personal preference that recognized no national borders, and since I shall be discussing aged grain distillates from several nations, rather than skipping back and forth like a spelling flea, I’ll stick to “whiskey” throughout.
g For the record, “aligant” is a Spanish wine, “minglum-manglum” an adulterated wine of any sort, “purr” a weak cider, “hum” a fortified ale, “mum” a strong beer, “aqua quaquam” strong water of any type and “sacum” sherry.
h The English still have a way with naming drinks. As proof, I adduce the Cheeky Vimto, a fairly nauseating mixture of port wine and blue alcopop claimed by its devotees to resemble Vimto, a popular (in Britain, anyway) purple soft drink.
i I don’t know if this was the first of its kind in England, but it’s certainly the first cited in the standard sources. I have not been able to establish when it opened or who ran it.
j The Dutch had been sniffing around those waters, nominally in the Portuguese sphere of influence, since 1596. They were not happy to have their fellow Protestants and erstwhile allies join them.
k Should you seek these places on the map, they are now known respectively as Dugarajupatnam and Nizampatnam.
l In 1665, “two senior Captains” of the company estimated that for a month in India, a man would need thirty bottles of Madeira, thirty of beer and fifteen of arrack. Indeed.
m “Arach,” “arak,” or however else this protean word is transliterated—“arrack” was the most common in our period—is derived from the Arabic word for “sweat” or “juice” and is generic throughout the Middle East and South, Central and Southeast Asia for a distilled spirit; hence, when used unmodified it is no more useful for identifying precisely what someone is drinking than our “liquor.” Materials it has been distilled from range from raisins and dates in the Middle East to fermented mare’s milk in Mongolia. 5 Lemons, citrons and both sweet and sour oranges were imported in increasing quantity throughout the seventeenth century, as English trade with the Mediterranean and, particularly, Portugal developed. During the same period, the spectacular growth of the Caribbean sugar industry meant that it went from being a rare spice to a culinary staple.
n Unlike the still used in western Europe, with its high, bulbous top and external condensing coil, the Chinese still relies on a woklike cover full of cold water to induce condensation, with a cup underneath it, inside the still, to collect what drips off the bottom of the wok. It is then drawn out by a pipe through the side of the pot.
o Hawkins got off lightly. Jahangir had others who had imbibed without authorization scourged in front of the court with barbed whips and then beaten with iron bars. And you thought your hangovers were bad. . . .
p Indeed, in 1622, Pietro della Valle, the scrupulous Italian traveler, found the English in Bandar Abbas, near t
he Straits of Hormuz, drinking an aqua vitae-based tipple called “Larkin,” which they had picked up in Java. He thought it so “gagliarda”—“potent”—and delicious that he had them teach him how to make it, although the recipe itself didn’t make it into his book. It’s worth noting that the company had a man named Robert Larkin in Java at the time.
q Some have also thought to derive the name from “puncheon,” a type of barrel, on the theory that spirits were shipped in them. Unfortunately, records do not bear that out, aqua vitae being carried in “runlets,” small kegs of thirteen (U.S.) gallons, while puncheons held from sixty to ninety gallons. Such a container used as a mixing bowl, another theory, would mean that every man in the typical ten-to-twenty-man factory would have had to drink several gallons of Punch; even shared out among a typical Elizabethan ship’s company that would yield between five and eight pints a man. Either quantity would be a paralyzing dose, if not a fatal one.
r Indeed, worse things could happen to beer than going sour, as Admiral of the Fleet Edward Russell recorded in 1689 after ten weeks at sea keeping station off the coast of Ireland: “in severall of the buts of beare, great heapes of stuff was found at the bottom of the buts not unlike to mens’ guts, which has alaramed the sea men to a strange degre.”
s Oddly enough, the gin-drinking Dutch seem to have stuck to victualing their ships with beer and wine as well, although they may have changed things after the 1595 voyage noted above, when they “learned what meat and drinke we should carrie with us that would keepe good.” They were shipping aqua vitae by 1609, anyway, since Henry Hudson’s men used it to intoxicate the poor Lenapes they found inhabiting Manhattan Island.
t He also had a distiller in each of his two main ships, ostensibly to provide fresh water—although who’s to say they couldn’t also whip up some sea-biscuit whiskey?
u As one of his men reported, Drake was forced to land early in his circumnavigation to address and attempt to quell “controversy” and “stomaching” between “the sailors and the gentlemen [i.e., the passengers],” which nearly derailed the voyage.
v The vendors used an ancestor of the modern bartender’s two-sided jigger to measure out their product: a gill—a quarter pint—on one side, half that on the other.
w Despite plague and fire, London drew in enough migrants from the countryside to end the century a far larger and busier place than it had been at its beginning. From a city of two hundred thousand at the death of Elizabeth, in 1603, it grew to half a million by the time William III died ninety-nine years later.
x Or—another argument for an English origin of the name—“punch” was a common English word for strong drink of whatever sort that was applied independently to both.
y The ordinary, a seventeenth-century response to a society in which increasing numbers of people were working away from home, was essentially an alehouse that served one or two set communal meals a day.
z But, as a look through the next century or so of London court records shows, hardly a unique one. Many a man, nautical or otherwise, would be plied with Punch until insensate, robbed and—if lucky—left in the gutter.
aa Mrs. Behn’s play, though quite Punch-sodden, wasn’t the wettest of its day: in 1693, Henry Higden’s Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot didn’t make it past the third act of its one and only performance, “the author having contrived so much drinking of punch in the play, that the actors all got drunk, and were unable to finish it.”
ab That works out to five or six pints a head. As the Grub Street Journal commented, “This Bowl is called with very great propriety a trough.”
ac Both palm and Batavia arracks were imported, even if it meant paying the hated Dutch for the latter—Charles II had settled the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in part, by giving up almost all English claims and factories in Indonesia and the Spice Islands, receiving in return the rather drab colony of New Amsterdam as a sort of consolation prize.
ad British vintners had a deplorable habit of fortifying and otherwise adulterating every last drop of wine or winelike substance that passed through their hands. Even claret—good French Bordeaux—received the stiffening shot of brandy and didn’t shake it off until well into the nineteenth century.
ae Of course, these principles could be applied equally well to mixology in general: strong must be set against weak, sour against sweet, yet with the whole in a state of dynamic tension wherein the contrasting ingredients are not completely neutralized to the point of being “homogeneal.”
af Drinks writing has few terms of art entirely its own; this is one of them, and it is indispensable. It simply means “it makes you want to drink more of it.”
ag This method, it must be acknowledged, can be surprisingly accurate; there are, for example, village distillers in Oaxaca who even today produce spirits of a consistent proof without using any measuring tools whatsoever.
ah In the early Punch years in particular, if he couldn’t get cognac, he’d be happy to settle for “Nantz,” from the then-booming distilling region around Nantes.
ai I should note that there is such a thing as too much hogo. I can recall a couple of cases in my experience—a clairin from Haiti and a pot-stilled sugarcane-juice rum from Grenada of great authenticity—where I not only threw in the towel but burned it to get rid of the smell.
aj In 1694, the Ironmonger’s Company Records contain notice of a Punch bowl made with a removable, scalloped rim so that it could also be used as a “monteith,” a then-popular style of bowl used for carrying wineglasses to the table, washing them and cooling them (the stems of the glasses fit in the indentations, with the business ends resting in the cool water within and the bases hanging high and dry outside). This double-duty style of bowl became widely popular.
ak By “wrote” here I mean “plagiarized,” as the comment was swiped verbatim from Gibbons Merle’s 1842 Domestic Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Manual.
al For example, a U.S. ounce is actually only .96 of an imperial ounce. Let’s just ignore that, shall we?
am In 1776, Sweden put it at the head of a list of prohibited foreign luxuries. That prohibition didn’t take, and bottled Arrack Punch base became one of the characteristic drinks of the Swedish people, only to be eclipsed by vodka in the late twentieth century.
an This might be a nominal price, but it wasn’t entirely nominal: the inventory of Wetherburn’s tavern made upon his death in 1760 values his arrack at a hefty one pound, or twenty shillings, a gallon, wholesale. Unfortunately, history is silent as to how big that bowl was, but colonial taverns definitely stocked ones far larger than the standard single, double and treble: William Black, visiting Philadelphia in 1744, recorded in his diary a literally staggering regimen of Punch morning, noon and night, all served in bowls “big enough for a goose to swim in.” Wetherburn’s largest Punch bowl thus could have held as much as eight or ten gallons, with a third of that being arrack. Considering that his tavern was the best in town and no doubt marked its booze up accordingly, that bowl of Punch may have cost ten pounds—making Randolph’s gesture to Thomas Jefferson’s father the eighteenth-century equivalent of charging a night of bottle service at a New York nightclub today.
ao Modern-day Bengkulu City, on the southeast coast of Sumatra, where the British established their last toehold in the archipelago in 1685.
ap The fact that the author of the continuation clearly doesn’t know what “rack” or “lime” mean in his recipe, conflating them as he does into the nonsensical “rack-lime,” which he explains as “lime-water,” suggests that Kirkman and not Head wrote the passage, since Head got that part right in the original book.
aq The interjections of “such a day” here are generally and wrongly interpreted as exclamations; they are, in fact, the editor’s way of saying “day x” and “day y,” rather than reproducing actual dates from the ship’s log—if, indeed, he didn’t make the whole thing up in the first place.
ar In fact, Mackenzie appended a slightly altered version of the same note
to his edition of “ODoherty,” a note that was reprinted verbatim, down to the final injunction to “Imbibe,” as the recipe for Glasgow Punch in Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tenders Guide.
as Perhaps the authors were mixed up by the scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s hugely popular farce She Stoops to Conquer, in which Bully Dawson is mentioned in the same breath as the insolent Mr. Marlow, who has pretensions as a Punch-maker.
at Speaking of the general public and technical language, the recipe right under that one bears repeating: “Take one Quarrt of Sack, half a Pint of Brandy, half a Pint of fair Water, the Juyce of two Limons, and some of the Pill [i.e., peel], so brew them together, with Sugar, and drink it.” The name of this only marginally less intoxicating drink? Not “Punch,” nor “Punch Royal,” but “Limonado.” Huh.
au The Cocktails, however, were pinched from the bilingual Bartender’s Manual published by the great American mixologist Harry Johnson.
av This technique is, in fact, a version of the modern one known as “fat washing,” in which an oil or a fat is mixed with liquor and, after it has contributed its flavor, coagulated (here by refrigeration) and removed.
aw He was still pronouncing Ashley’s “pretty agreeable” seventeen years later, when he had given up the other sort of amusement; vinum longum, amor brevis.
ax Take, for example, the 1734 ad for James Bowman’s Punch house in Bristol, in which its proprietor holds Ashley up as a model and then claims his Punch is “in all Respects to be made to as great Perfection as by . . . Mr. Ashley.” By 1736, there was even a Punch house on Ludgate Hill that copied Ashley’s signage and offered a quart of brandy or rum made into Punch for three shillings fourpence. Ouch.
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