Imbibe! (14 page)

Finally, a Punch not from Jerry Thomas. The Chatham Artillery of Savannah was a Social-Register militia of considerable antiquity (it was formed in 1786) that spent far more time parading and partying than it did loading cannons and shooting them, at least until those hotheads up the coast in Charleston fired on Fort Sumter. After seeing considerable action in its neck of the woods, part of the battery was captured in 1864 and the rest surrendered in 1865. Eventually, it was reconstituted, going on to serve in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and on, until the present, As I write this, it—or rather its successor, the 118th Battalion of the Georgia National Guard—is deployed in Iraq.

Back in the day, it was not a unit that deprived itself of the good things in life, as long as such were to be had. As Charles Jones recalled in 1867, at the beginning of the Civil War “the
cuisine
of the company was perfect” and “the well fed Artillery-man, enjoying his champagne punch within the comfortable casemates, little thought of the coming day when even a glass of Confederate whisky could not be obtained.”

I don’t know precisely when the below recipe made its debut or its connection to Jones’s “champagne punch,” but by the end of the century the Chatham Artillery’s house Punch was a byword for its seductiveness and potency. One Georgia newspaper assured its readers in 1883 that “there is such a beverage made and known as artillery punch. We are living witnesses to the fact that it is no misnomer. When it attacketh a man it layeth him low and he knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth.” That was Admiral Dewey’s experience of it, anyway, when he visited Savannah in 1900, just as it was Chester Arthur’s a few years before and William Howard Taft’s a few years after. The
Baltimore American
summed up its reputation in a poem, or at least a limerick:

 

 

The city’s boosters conceded its strength, but claimed that the skill with which the locals concocted it mitigated the damage; that “in Savannah, it puts a man to bed like a gentleman; outside of Savannah it makes him a howling imbecile, a laughing-stock for the populace, and a victim for the police barracks.”

Although the Punch’s composition was supposedly no secret, I have been unable to find a formula for it earlier than 1897, when a member of the Georgia Pharmaceutical Society contributed sketchy and manifestly incomplete instructions for it to a trade journal. The version below, printed a decade later, is somewhat better, although it nonetheless bears clear signs of corruption. (Its source admits as much when it says that “its vigor in those days [i.e., when the Chatham Artillery was founded] was much greater than at present, experience having taught the rising generation to modify the receipt of their forefathers to conform to the weaker constitutions of their progeny.”)

 

 

 

SOURCE: PERCY HAMMOND AND GEORGE C. WHARTON,
POKER, SMOKE AND OTHER THINGS
, 1907

 

 

 

Dificilior
or not, the Fix, or “Fix-Up” (which gives us a clue as to its etymology) isn’t exactly complicated—it’s merely a short Punch with fancy fruit garnish. As such, it’s a surprisingly mysterious beverage: It appears in just about all the bartender’s bibles published before Prohibition and is among the few drinks listed as essential for the bartender to know in Paul Lowe’s influential
Drinks: How to Mix and Serve
from 1909—and yet devil a drinker do you find actually ordering one. (I suspect that most people, not well up on their technical mixology, would have simply described it as a “fancy Sour,” which may explain why we don’t hear of it.)

 

 

1 TABLE-SPOONFUL
[1 TSP]
OF SUGAR
[JUICE OF]
¼ OF A LEMON
½ A WINE-GLASS
[1 TBSP]
OF WATER
1 WINE-GLASS
[2 OZ]
OF
[SPIRITS]

 

SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862 (COMPOSITE)

“When American meets American then comes the whisky sour.” Thus declared the
Atlanta Daily Constitution
in 1879, and it wasn’t wrong. From roughly the 1860s to the 1960s, the Sour, and particularly its whiskey incarnation, was one of the cardinal points of American drinking, and, along with the Highball, one of the few drinks that could come near to slugging it out with the vast and aggressive tribe of Cocktails in terms of day-in, day-out popularity. It began pulling away from its siblings among the lesser Punches early: In 1858, we find it popular enough that the
New York Times
could attach the epithet “Brandy-sour”
to the name of a certain Mr. Brisley and expect people to know what that meant. In 1863, matters had already reached the point that the local paper from across the river in the great and liberal city of Brooklyn considered “compounder of cocktails, skins and sours” an acceptable circumlocution for “barkeeper.”

Two things appear to have driven the Sour’s quick elevation to indispensability: It was simple, and it was flexible. “The . . . sour,” wrote Jerry Thomas, “is made with the same ingredients as the . . . fix, omitting all fruits except a small piece of lemon, the juice of which must be pressed in the glass.” So: spirits, sugar, water, lemon, ice. The only real question here is the ratio of sugar to lemon. But that one’s a doozy (it still is—if you want to get a mixologist riled, tell him he’s put too much sugar in his Sour). There were essentially two schools: those who took the name seriously, and those who considered it akin to a child’s protestation that she’s not tired at all, really. The former, among whom we may count the author of the
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
and whoever reworked the Professor’s book, call for the juice of half of a lemon and a teaspoon or so of sugar—a tart and tasty drink. But Jerry Thomas himself, and most who followed him—Harry Johnson, George Kappeler, Bill Boothby—show what is perhaps a more realistic view of human nature and make their Sours sweet, restricting the lemon juice to a few dashes or a quarter of a lemon’s worth at most, and making sure that there’s plenty of sweet to balance it out.

One notable innovation was to cap a Whiskey Sour with a float of red wine, to give it what one Chicago bartender called “the claret ‘snap’” (in the language of the saloon, red wine was always called “claret,” no matter how distant its origins from the sunlit banks of the Gironde). This worthy, who was interviewed in 1883, claimed ownership over this bit of fanciness, adding that “men who drink our sours expect a claret at every bar, and when it is not put in they ask for it. It’s getting circulated now, and other places are adopting our flourish.” (One is entitled to be skeptical, as he claimed to have invented the Manhattan as well, but there does exist another description of a Chicago bartender assembling a Whiskey Sour that same year, and lo and behold, he tops it off with claret, too.) Whoever invented it, this “Continental Sour,” “Southern Whiskey Sour,” or—the name it finally settled on in the early 1900s—“New York Sour” was broadly popular. As our Chicago barkeep noted, “the claret makes the drink look well and it gives it a better taste.”

In the 1890s, some of the fecundity with which bartenders were generating new Cocktails and Fizzes touched the humble Sour as well, and where before there had been only the basic versions, named after the spirits that animated them, suddenly the bars are festooned with signs for Blackthorn Sours (with sloe gin, pineapple syrup, and a splash of apricot liqueur), Sours a la Creole (brandy and Jamaica rum with lime juice and “a little ice cream on top”), Dizzy Sours (rye with a dash of Benedictine and a Jamaica rum float), Jack Frost Whiskey Sours (apple “whiskey”—i.e., applejack—with an egg and cream), and the like.

But by this point the Sour was already being attracted away from its orbit around Punch and into a new one around the Cocktail. This realignment was greatly facilitated by a trend that began early: The
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
instructed that “in the manufacture of fixes and sours a small bar-glass or ordinary tumbler is employed, and a strainer placed in the glass to drink through.” This use of the strainer was popular for a time, but by the 1880s bartenders had taken control of the device back from the drinker and were serving their Sours up, in a special Sour glass—basically, a footed glass, rather deeper than a Cocktail glass (to make room for the drink’s somewhat more generous proportions, for the garnish that it had swiped from the Fix, and for the seltzer with which it was sometimes lightened). After 1905 or so, most new short drinks with citrus became Cocktails (see Cocktail Punches) and the Sour’s flirtation with fanciness ceased.

I’ve provided the formula from the
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
since it’s a little more precise than Thomas’s.

 

ONE WINE GLASS
[2 OZ]
OF
[SPIRITS]

 

HALF WINE GLASS
[1 OZ]
OF WATER
ONE TABLESPOONFUL OF SUGAR
HALF OF A LEMON

 

 

SOURCE:
STEWARD & BARKEEPER’S MANUAL
, 1869 (COMPOSITE)