Imbibe!

by David Wondrich

  There are passages in the chapters that follow, I should also note, where the grain of the historical detail gets rather fine. Many of these drinks are entangled in tenacious (and widely publicized) webs of myth, falsehood, and incomplete information, and I can think of no other way to extricate them than to lay out the facts in all their minute, even trivial detail. I’ve done my best to keep this within reasonable bounds—you should see what I left out—but where I’ve failed, I ask your indulgence. At least the anecdotes and citations that convey the detail are for the most part newly excavated from the archives and thus, I hope, will have the force of novelty.

  CHAPTER 3

  PUNCHES

  For nearly two hundred years, from the 1670s to the 1850s, the Kingdom of Mixed Drinks was ruled by the Bowl of Punch, a large-bore mixture of spirits, citrus, sugar, water, and spice that bears the same relation to the anemic concoctions that pass under its name today that gladiatorial combat does to a sorority pillow fight. This isn’t the place to go into its origins or its early history; those deserve a book of their own, and God willing they’ll get one. Suffice it to say that it appears to be a version of the English drink detailed by George Gascoine in 1576 in his Delicate Diet for Daintie Mouthde Droonkardes, consisting of wine with “Sugar, Limons and sundry sortes of Spices . . . drowned therein,” made by English travelers in India with local ingredients—various strong spirits and lots more citrus—and spread by sailors to the mother country, her colonies and neighbors, and eventually the world.

  At its peak, the ritual of the Punch bowl was a secular communion, welding a group of good fellows together into a temporary sodality whose values superseded all others—or, in plain English, a group of men gathered around a bowl of Punch could be pretty much counted on to see it to the end, come what may. This was all in good fun, but it required its participants to have a large block of uncommitted time on their hands. As the eighteenth century wore into the nineteenth, this was less and less likely to be the case. Industrialization, improved communications, and the rise of the bourgeoisie all made claims on the individual that militated against partaking of the Flowing Bowl. Not that the Victorians were exactly sober, by our standards, but neither could they be as wet as their forefathers. In 1853, Household Words, the magazine edited by Charles Dickens, printed a nostalgic little piece titled “A Bowl of Punch,” prompted by the author—the article was unsigned, but it well may have been Dickens himself—going into the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street and finding that the familiar old china Punch bowls that had occupied a shelf in the barroom, all ranked in a row ready for use, had been stacked up in a corner “as if no longer asked for.” This was in fact the case. As Robert Chambers put it in 1864, “Advanced ideas on the question of temperance have doubtless . . . had their influence in rendering obsolete, in a great measure, this beverage.”

  The same fate befell the bowl of Punch in America, only two generations sooner. It’s not that Americans suddenly stopped liking Punch. But they were busy, or at least thought it a virtue to seem that way. To sit around at a tavern ladling libations out of a capacious bowl was as much as to confess that you didn’t have anywhere to be for the next few hours, and America was a go-ahead country, as everyone was always saying. (Americans were in no way averse to daytime drinking, I hasten to add; but it had to be quick.) From a workhorse of daily drinking, the bowl of Punch got promoted into a job that was largely ceremonial. It became a thing to be trotted out at club banquets and on holidays.

  Its size and potency aren’t the only things that sidelined the bowl of Punch. Improvements in distilling and, above all, aging of liquors meant that they required less intervention to make them palatable. The maturation of the global economy made for greater choice of potables and a more fragmented culture of drink. To some degree, central heating dimmed the charms of hot Punch. Ideas of democracy and individualism extended to men’s behavior in the barroom, where they were less likely to all settle for the same thing or let someone else choose what they were to drink. In short, like all long-running social institutions the Bowl of Punch was subject to a plethora of subtle and incremental strains. By the time Jerry Thomas set pen to paper, it was already old-fashioned, and though his book contained recipes for fifty-nine Punch-bowl drinks, it’s safe to say that most of them were foisted on him by his publishers and were essentially obsolete. The 1887 edition of his book finally acknowledged this by bumping the section on Punch from the front of the book to the back and replacing it with the one on Cocktails. (In the bartending guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the section devoted to bowls of Punch is truly vestigial, generally offering something like a dozen formulae and no more.) I have followed this tradition and reserved all but three recipes for Punch by the Bowl for their own book; those three, native American concoctions of great potency and charm, will be found after the section on Punches by the Glass.

  Of course we didn’t stop drinking Punch; it was too delectable and cooling a drink for that. We just figured out a way of having it quick and on the spot—as a people, we hate to hear the word no, and like nothing better than having it both ways. And we’re willing to pay for it. Where there’s someone willing to pay, there’s usually someone willing to take that money. When Captain Fitzgerald saw Willard at the City Hotel, you’ll recall, he was “preparing and issuing forth punch and spirits to strange-looking men.” This suggests a much higher level of activity than the landlord’s leisurely mixing of a bowl of Punch; it’s likely that Willard was making them to order, one glass at a time. That’s certainly how he was doing them later, and that’s also how, before long, everybody else was taking them. The American plan has always been “I want mine now,” and why shouldn’t that apply to Punch as well? In fact, Willard wasn’t even the first: According to the memoirs of the rowdy rambler Big Bill Otter, by 1806 plenty of New York bars were selling Punch by the glass, both large and small. In this chapter, we’ll tackle the Greater Punches, as it were, the ones generally made long and strong.

  I. A LARGE GLASS OF PUNCH

  By Jerry Thomas’s day, there were a great many formulae for one-shot Punches in circulation (sadly, though, the formula for Willard’s famous Extra Extra Peach Brandy Punch appears to have died with its creator). I present here a generous selection of the most important and, of course, tastiest.

  BRANDY PUNCH

  The first drink in Jerry Thomas’s book—and indeed quite possibly his first acknowledgment as a bartender: On February 7, 1853, page four of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle carried a set of verses on a newspaper P. T. Barnum had launched, including these lines, satirizing Barnum’s support of Prohibition (which

  Brandy Punch. From The Bon Vivant’s Companion, 1862. Note cigars, right. (Author’s collection)

  had been enacted in Maine in 1851, with the lax and arbitrary enforcement that usually accompanies such schemes):

  In Yankee land, the papers say,

  Barnum talks “Maine Law” all day,

  But beneath his monster show,

  Brandy punch is all the go.

  If Thomas and George Earle were still running the Exchange under Barnum’s Museum and Thomas was making the Punch the same way at age twenty-three as he was at age thirty-two when his book came out, small wonder it was all the go. In Thomas’s hands, the individual Brandy Punch is the very epitome of the Fancy Drink; indeed, he felt so strongly about it that one of the book’s few illustrations was devoted to it.

  The popularity of Brandy Punch peaked before the Civil War, with the popularity of brandy itself. Postwar, many of the gents who drank it—the ones who survived the shooting, that is—seem to have switched their attention to the Sour, for which see below. A cautionary note, though: Like many of the Professor’s drinks, this one’s not for the novice tippler. It’s a potent drink for long, slow sipping.

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)

  1 TABLE-SPOONFUL RASPBERRY SYRUP

  2 TABLE-SPOONFULS [2 TSP] WHITE SUGAR

  1 WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] WATER


  1½ WINE-GLASS [3 OZ] BRANDY

  ½ SMALL-SIZED LEMON

  2 SLICES OF ORANGE

  1 PIECE OF PINE-APPLE

  Fill the tumbler with shaved ice, shake well, and dress the top with berries in season; sip through a straw.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: The sugar should be superfine, the brandy cognac, and the berries whatever strikes your fancy. The illustration in Thomas’s book appears to show a raspberry and a strawberry.

  Thomas provides three close variations for this: To make this into Curaçoa Punch, substitute that liqueur for the raspberry syrup, replace 1 ounce of the brandy with Jamaica rum and “sip the nectar through a straw.” For West Indian Punch, “add a clove or two of preserved ginger, and a little of the syrup.” For Barbadoes Punch (as Thomas spells it), “add a table-spoonful of guava jelly.” Both are very fine drinks, particularly if you drop the raspberry syrup and increase the sugar to ½-ounce. These two should also be made with 2 ounces of brandy and 1 ounce of rum, with Mount Gay or Cockburn’s in the Barbadoes Punch and pretty much any rum you like in the West Indian. From Charles W. Campbell’s 1867 American Barkeeper, we collect another West Indian variation, the Tamarind Punch. Make as the Brandy Punch, cutting the brandy back to 2 ounces, substituting 1 tablespoon of tamarind jelly for the lemon juice and dashing a fragrant Jamaica rum liberally on top at the end.

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Begin by squeezing the lemon into the glass. Add the sugar and the water and stir. Then pour in the syrup and the brandy. The orange slices and the pineapple are a matter of taste and conjecture. The engraving accompanying the recipe shows them as a mere garnish, but there’s every possibility that that was mere artistic license and everything, berries included, was all shaken up together; that’s what the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual states, anyway, and very clearly at that. If done in a Boston shaker with plenty of ice, the result would be a gooey mess. But rolled back and forth with shaved ice, which lacks the kinetic energy to break up fruits, it would be rather more attractive. In short, I’ll use the fruits as garnish if all I’ve got is bar ice; if I’ve got shaved or finely cracked ice, I’ll give everything a gentle shake, reserving a couple of berries for the top.

  The jellies in Barbadoes Punch and Tamarind Punch take special handling, since they will not readily dissolve in cold water. Put the jelly in the glass first and add a splash of hot water (½ to ¾ of an ounce), stirring well before adding the rest of the ingredients (the water should be reduced accordingly). If making a bunch of these, you can do this in advance, preparing a sort of syrup with equal parts water and jelly.

  VANILLA PUNCH

  One more quick Brandy Punch variation from Professor Thomas. Clearly it was a specialty of his, and I’ll respect that. This one is simple and very tasty. The 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual published by Haney & Co. in New York calls this a “Scadeva Punch” and notes that “this drink is seldom called for at a bar, and is known to only a few prominent bartenders” (the name is either a typo or a mangling of something intelligible or it’s the Italian word for “it fell off,” which is hard to explain unless the recipe fell off the back of a dray-wagon).

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)

  1 TABLE-SPOONFUL [2 TSP] OF SUGAR

  1 WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] OF BRANDY

  THE JUICE OF ¼ LEMON

  Fill the tumbler with shaved ice, shake well, ornament with one or two slices of lemon, and flavor with a few drops of vanilla extract. This is a delicious drink, and should be imbibed through a glass tube or straw.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: If at all possible, use a good vanilla extract, such as the one made by Charles H. Baldwin & Co of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, an old Yankee brand if ever there was one.

  PISCO PUNCH

  “You should have had a snort of Mrs. Sykes’ Pisco Punch. . . . It was said New York had not before ever seen or heard of the insidious concoction which in its time had caused the unseating of South American governments and women to set world’s records in various and interesting fields of activity. In early San Francisco, where the punch first made its North American appearance in 1856, the police allowed but one drink per person in twenty-four hours, it’s that propulsive. But Mrs. Sykes served them up like pain, à discrétion, as the signs used to say in front of the little restaurants in Paris, meaning you could have all the bread you wanted. As a consequence, discretion vanished.”

  In 1950, when A. J. Liebling’s pal James A. MacDonald, alias Col. John R. Stingo, was recalling these events (which transpired when a party of San Francisco con artists came to New York), Pisco Punch was the mixological equivalent to a lost Mozart symphony. Before Prohibition, this particular twist on the old Brandy Punch had been San Francisco’s secret weapon, a drink so smooth, delightful, and potent that, well, as the Colonel says . . . Though, as Harold Ross of the New Yorker later recalled, “All San Francisco bars used to serve them, and one or two served nothing else,” it was universally acknowledged that the one true and authentic recipe—complete with secret ingredient—was in the sole possession of a closemouthed old Scot by the name of Duncan Nicol, proprietor of the historic Bank Exchange saloon; he died in 1926, his secret seemingly intact. Five or six years later, the historian Herbert Asbury scoured the town “industriously, even desperately” for a bottle of pisco, the clear South American brandy upon which the drink was based; he found none. Nor did the situation improve much after Repeal: there was a short-lived attempt to sell a bottled Pisco Punch, and San Francisco maintained a “House of Pisco” for a while in the mid-1940s, but by 1950 both Punch and pisco had effectively vanished from the American pharmacopoeia. While I cannot in good conscience call this a tragedy, it is certainly a shame. For the seventy-odd years leading up to Prohibition, San Francisco had witnessed the finest flowering of the American sporting life—that created by the “gentleman of elegant leisure,” as one early San Franciscan defined his occupation, and the soiled doves with which he associated—and Pisco Punch was its Oil of Anointment. That life is beyond recovery, but thankfully the Punch is not. Although a few recipes were published in the 1900s and 1910s, this one, from Nicol’s bar manager, has the greatest claim to authenticity.

  1. Take a fresh pineapple. Cut it in squares about ½ by 1½ inches. Put these squares of fresh pineapple in a bowl of gum syrup to soak overnight. That serves the double purpose of flavoring the gum syrup with the pineapple and soaking the pineapple, both of which are used afterwards in the Pisco Punch.

  2. In the morning mix in a big bowl the following:

  ½ PINT (8 OZ) OF THE GUM SYRUP, PINEAPPLE FLAVORED AS ABOVE

  1 PINT (16 OZ) DISTILLED WATER

  ¾ PINT (10 OZ [SIC]) LEMON JUICE

  1 BOTTLE (24 OZ) PERUVIAN PISCO BRANDY

  Serve very cold but be careful not to keep the ice in too long because of dilution. Use 3 or 4 oz punch glasses. Put one of these above squares of pineapple in each glass. Lemon juice or gum syrup may be added to taste.

  SOURCE: WILLIAM BRONSON, “SECRETS OF PISCO PUNCH REVEALED,” CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, 1973

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: If possible the pisco should be of the varietal known as Italia (Barsol and Don Cesar are two particularly good brands). One of the early recipes claims that lime juice can also be used. It can. It has been suggested to me that Nicol’s secret ingredient was cocaine, at least until it was outlawed. I don’t recommend it.

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Nicol had his own procedure for preparing this, which included compounding part of it in secrecy in the basement every morning. Pauline Jacobson, a color writer for the San Francisco Bulletin who did a piece about the Bank Exchange in 1912, watched Nicol assemble the drink and recorded one of the regulars’ commentary on the process:

  “See . . . he is squeezing a f-r-e-s-h lemon. In the bar uptown they have the lemon juice already prepared, which leaves a bitter taste after drinking. And Duncan n-e-v-e-r uses any of them effervescent waters. . . .
He always uses distilled water.”

  This, combined with Jacobson’s description of Nicol, “intent upon his work, with hands trembling with the years, yet measuring with the nicety of an apothecary,” prompts me to suggest the following procedure:

  First, prepare the pineapple syrup, as above. Mix this with the pisco, with three parts pisco to one part syrup and bottle it (this will keep in the refrigerator for at least a couple of weeks, and longer if you strain out the sediment that it will throw off ). To assemble the drink, combine in a cocktail shaker 2 ounces of the pisco-syrup mix, ¾ ounce distilled water (or bottled water, or tap water if yours is good), squeeze the juice of half a (small) lemon or lime into this, add ice, shake, and strain into a small bar-glass; add a chunk of syrup-soaked pineapple and serve.

  COLD WHISKEY PUNCH

  While the early mixographers pretty much ignored American whiskey Punches, their nonliterary peers and their customers didn’t. “An iced monongahela punch,” as a correspondent in New Orleans informed the readers of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1852, “is not at all bad to take . . . it forms a most admirable thirst-quenching and exhilarating drink. The liquor should have age to render it excellent.”

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)