Punch (17 page)

India wasn’t the only Punch-drenched part of the East. We must not neglect Java and Sumatra and their neighboring islands. The ports of Batavia and Bantam and, a little later, Bencoolen
^ao
were packed cheek to jowl with Punch houses. When the English privateer Woodes Rogers put into Batavia in 1710, he noted that some of his crew “were hugging each other, others blessing themselves that they were come to such a glorious Place for Punch, where they could have Arack for 8 Pence
per
Gallon, and Sugar for 1 Peny a Pound.”

While we may share the sailors’ joy, it doesn’t help us much with the mixology. Nor, alas, do the accounts of other contemporary travelers. It is as if once they put into these ports, the seafarers found something there to creep in through their mouths and steal away their brains. Fortunately, there exists one source that communicates some details about what Punch meant in the eastern parts of the East Indies. In 1665, one Richard Head—perhaps early English prose fiction’s most disreputable practitioner, and that’s saying something—published the work for which he is remembered:
The English Rogue: Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant
. For “witty extravagant,” read “utter scumbag.” Latroon, the book’s narrator, is a runaway apprentice who steals, swills, swives and swindles his way through England and Ireland until the powers that be decide that the best place for him is anywhere else and transport him abroad (and that’s only the censored version; as Head’s friend William Winstanley wrote, the book in its original form “being too much smutty, would not be Licensed, so that he was fain to refine it”).

Head, an expert at swilling himself, renders his hero’s swilling in considerable detail. Ultimately, that swilling even extends to Punch, marking its earliest appearances in English fiction. That Punch-drinking doesn’t happen in the British Isles, though, but rather in Bantam, where Latroon finds himself after a chain of unfortunate and highly unlikely events. There, in the street called “China Row,” he not only drinks “very immoderately of punch, rack, tea
& c
. which was brought up in great china jugs holding at least two quarts” but marries the Indian Punch-house keeper who supplies it to him. (Nobody said he was stupid.) It’s unclear from the text whether the rack and tea were combined to make the Punch or whether they were separate drinks. But then again, one shouldn’t wonder at the confusion: neither Head nor Francis Kirkman, who published a 1668 continuation of the book (probably without Head’s collaboration) that picks up where the first volume left off and thus begins with Punch-drinking, had ever been to the Indies.

Whether the recipe was cribbed from an as-yet-undiscovered travel book or picked up from a sailor in a bar, the Punch detailed in
The English Rogue
is of doubtful provenance, and even though there’s nothing about it that explicitly forbids us doing so, it would be rash to take it as an authentic depiction of what was being mixed and drunk in Java.
^ap
Yet if we disregard such qualms and do our best to re-create the recipe as if it were indeed authentic, using what would have been available at that time and place, we end up with a beverage that is as dark, rich and almost meaty as the Bombay Presidency Punch is light and delicate, and thus have the two poles of Punch-making in its original rangeland.

For we had not only the country drink called toddee, which is made of the juice of several trees, and punch, which is made of rack-lime, or lime-water, sugar, spices, and sometimes the addition of amber-grease, but we likewise drank great quantities of Persian wine, which is much like claret, and brought from that country in bottles.

Ambergris is clotted whale cholesterol, secreted in large lumps that float around until they wash ashore. That doesn’t sound very appetizing, but by the time it washes up, ambergris has aged into a lightly, sweetly and very persistently fragrant substance that most resembles soap. What with the present state of the whale, it is also hideously expensive, but then again, it was never cheap (see “Sources for Rare Ingredients and Tools,” page 281). Since it is essentially a fat, it must be rendered mixable before it can be used, which the above process will do. If the trouble, expense (it goes for about twenty dollars a gram) or squick factor is too much for you, it may easily be omitted, although it does add a subtle, insinuating I-know-not-what to the Punch that cannot otherwise be replicated.

For muddling the ambergris, regular demerara sugar is better at absorbing the fragrance, if less authentic. If you can’t get gula jawa, which is a sticky, funky mix of palm and sugarcane sugars, then muscovado, piloncillo, panela or jaggery will do. But it’s worth tracking the real stuff down, as it gives the Punch its porterlike color and a good deal of its umami-driven brothiness. If you don’t have a pitcher, a bowl will of course work just fine. I don’t recommend ice here, although an hour in the refrigerator will do no harm.

If you wish to incorporate tea, as Head’s brief note seems to suggest, add 3 cups of hot green tea, made with 3 teaspoons of loose tea or three tea bags, to the sugar-lime juice- ambergris extract mixture, stir and then add the arrack. Add, if necessary, another cup of cool water at the end.

In making ’rack punch, you ought to put two glasses of rum to three of arrack. A good deal of sugar is required; but sweetening, after all, must be left to taste. Kitchener is frequently absurd, when he prescribes by weight and measure for such things. Lemons and limes are also matter of palate, but two lemons are enough for the above quantity; put then an equal quantity of water—i.e., not five but six glasses to allow for the lemon juice, and you have a very pretty three tumblers of punch. Mix in a jug.

If you are afraid of head-aches—for, as Xenophon says of another kind of Eastern tipple, ’rack punch is κεϕαλαλγες [i.e., “headache-making”]—put twice as much water as spirits. I, however, never use it that way for my own private drinking.

The one thing that Thomas adds to the recipe is to specify, correctly, that the glasses should be two-ounce wineglasses. Maginn is correct about the sugar—I suggest the above amount of sugar in full knowledge that I risk falling into the same absurdity as poor Dr. Kitchiner, who wrote the 1817
Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook’s Oracle
. If you’re comfortable with white sugar here, the Punch will be quicker to assemble, as you can ditch the boiling water. Or you can use 2 ounces of 2:1 demerara sugar syrup, alias rich simple syrup (simply stir two parts demerara sugar and one part water together over low heat until all the sugar has dissolved). As for the arrack, Batavia Arrack van Oosten, available domestically, is what you’ll want here, unless you can get the 116-proof Boven’s from Germany. (Dr. Kitchiner, to his credit, believed that “arrack punch . . . is always made with that spirit alone.”) For the rum, go for a good, pungent Pirate Juice or, even better, a half-and-half blend of funky Pirate Juice and mellow Planter’s Best-style rums. I’m particularly partial to a fifty-fifty mix of Smith & Cross and Plantation Barbados five-year. Like ODoherty, Kitchiner held that lime and lemon juice were both acceptable here, although where ODoherty preferred the latter, he chose the former. I agree with Kitchiner. About his contention that “the flavour of the Seville orange interferes too much with the peculiar flavour of the arrack, which proves so grateful to most tastes, though to many very unpleasant,” I can only agree with the second part; the Seville orange will only step on the rack if you make an oleo-saccharum, which for an on-the-fly Punch such as this is entirely unnecessary. But yes, there are some poor benighted souls to whom the savor of Batavia arrack is not pleasant.
Suum cuique
.

Outside of Indonesia, where it’s mostly drunk straight or mixed with soda pop, the most common use for Batavia arrack these days is in something called Swedish Punch, an achingly sweet, slightly citrusy, low-proof, arrack-based liqueur that seems to have been originally designed as a sort of Arrack Punch concentrate: just add hot water and Sven’s your uncle. Ironically, in the two decades just before Prohibition, this Scandinavian specialty was making great strides as a Cocktail ingredient, ensuring that the distinctive flavor of arrack, having been shuffled out mixology’s front door, was slipping in through the back. These days, unfortunately, Swedish Punch is imperiled even in Sweden, where this former drink of the people—traditionally consumed on a Thursday, before a bowl of pea soup; I’m not making that up—has largely been replaced by the same rootless, internationalized Highballs and club drinks for which the rest of western Europe has traded its drinkways.

The formula was an old one, anyway, and not just Scandinavian: follow the instructions in this recipe, and you’re left with two quarts of something essentially indistinguishable from Swedish Punch. It can also be drunk as is, either cold or hot. If you choose the latter, it’s worth heeding the words appended to it by F. S. Cozzens, the discursive New York wine merchant from whose newsletter this recipe hails: “those whose impatience will not permit them to wait until it is cold, should use it with caution.” Even cold, “it should only be drunk from small glasses.” Fair warning.