ay The takeaway: “Punch! That no mortal man alive wou’d drink, / Had he but Power or Willingness to think.” Evidently Mitchell once drank too much of it.
az The Gaelic terms are literal translations of the Latin.
ba “After supper,” he wrote to a friend, “I for the first time drank whisky punch, the taste of which is harsh and austere, and the smell worse than the taste. . . . The spirit was very fierce and wild, requiring not less than seven times its own quantity of water to tame and subdue it.” Now, admittedly there was much bootlegging at the time, and the potheen was often less than debonair, but the last bit gives him away as a liar, a bigot or a milquetoast. Even if the whiskey he tried was pure alcohol, with it making up an eighth of the total volume, the Punch would have only been 25 proof; and in fact Campbell states that the stuff he had wasn’t even the strongest whiskey available; if he was telling the truth about the dilution, the Punch would’ve been about the proof of a strong ale. But I digress.
bb I suspect that the widespread popularity of this alternate name stems from an uneasiness with the combination of “gin” and “Punch.”
bc On the other hand, in an 1834 piece in the New Monthly Magazine we hear of one Raggett, at the Cocoa Tree (a popular coffeehouse), “who for no price will sell the secret” of his iced Gin Punch; one would like to know more about Mr. Raggett and his secret.
bd One story of its origin that later circulated fairly extensively involved the pope’s private chef, the Empress Josephine, a Livonian prince and the prince regent. Romantic as it is, it is alas pure horseshit.
be To cite one example among many, the 1756 novel The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, which influenced Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, has people at one point drinking bottled “Arrack Punch made with Green-tea.”
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