Punch (18 page)

London’s United Service Club was founded in 1816, after the two-headed specter of Napoleon and revolution was safely laid to rest, in order to bring senior officers in the army and the navy together. Once they were so brought, they all seemed to have agreed that the best strategy for coexistence was to sink into their deep leather armchairs and not move until it was unclear whether they even could. The most exciting thing recorded in the club’s history was when the Duke of Wellington, a member, disputed a bill and got three shillings taken off.

The club’s general outlook on life is mirrored in the extreme conservativeness of its Punch. Then again, few Punches are as fundamentally sound. I’m not saying that there’s a correlation.

Begin with an oleo-saccharum of four lemons and 12 ounces Florida Crystals or other restrained raw sugar. For the tea, nothing fancy: plain old black tea works fine. The pint here is of course the imperial one, so you’ll need 5 cups of tea (made with five tea bags or 5 teaspoons loose tea) and 2½ cups of Batavia arrack. My instinct is to deploy the nutmeg grater here, but whenever I move to do so I see those red, jowly faces glowering at me and beat a hasty retreat. This is good either hot or cold.

BRANDY PUNCH, RUM PUNCH, AND BRANDY AND RUM PUNCH

Once Punch made it out of Asia and into Britain and her Caribbean possessions, it didn’t take very long for it to go native. As we’ve seen, by 1670 people had learned to replace the exotic, expensive and often hard-to-get arrack with brandy in England and rum in the Americas—the former because it was the best thing they could get, the latter because it was the only. Brandy Punch properly made being a most delightful drink indeed, there were many who were of Swift’s opinion and considered the substitute superior to the original. Most of the rest were at least willing to see it mentioned in the same breath, so that the Scottish agriculturalist William Mackintosh could lament that his countrymen had learned to scorn the humble ale of his youth for imported wine or, if that was unavailable, “a Snaker [
sic
] of Rack or Brandy Punch.” That was in 1729. By the middle of the century, brandy had become the safe, almost middle-class choice for spirit to go in your Punch. Even a relative nonentity, such as the small-town Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner, who kept a meticulous diary in the 1760s, could occasionally indulge in “an agreeable bowl of punch” made with smuggled French brandy (it helped that he was friends with the local officer of excise, who would contribute confiscated bottles to the cause). Over the next decades, Brandy Punch would move up and down the social ladder by a few rungs, depending on the state of Britain’s relations with France. When cannon and bayonet did the talking, brandy climbed out of reach of the aspirational classes (unless you count “British brandy,” which was doctored malt spirit—essentially, bad whiskey). At other times, you would have scenes like Bob Sawyer’s little bachelor’s party in
The Pickwick Papers
, complete with mismatched glassware, jugs of warm Brandy Punch and a long-unpaid landlady who cuts off the hot water supply just when it’s most needed.

But what of Rum Punch? At first look, it certainly had a different core clientele from its vinous cousin. Men like the members of the Bermuda General Assembly, whom their ostensible lieutenant governor described in 1724 as preferring to spend their days “wandering from one uninhabited Island to another (in their sloops), fishing for wrecks, and trading with Pyrat’s, and living not like animals that are imbued with reason.” On the rare occasion these vagabonds could be called together, he continues, “It is fitter to be imagin’d, than for me to tell . . . the effects which Rum Punch produces in an Assembly of 36 men, such as I have describ’d.” Rum Punch wasn’t served at every sitting of every colonial assembly, but—as a look at some of the surviving tavern bills quickly displays—it was far from an unknown beverage. But it isn’t so much assemblymen whom we associate with Rum Punch as the fellows with whom those Bermudians were trading: pirates.

There’s an oft-cited passage in the
General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates
, published by the pseudonymous “Captain Charles Johnson” in 1724, that the author claims was copied from the journal of Edward Teach, or Blackbeard himself:

This vivid scrap of prose—among the most vivid in the English language—has helped spawn countless scenes of pirates swilling rum from the bottle and cask, stinking drunk, vile and filthy.

Those last three things might certainly be accurate; most pirates were not overcareful of their linen and liked a drink of rum from time to time. But when it comes to the way they drank that rum, modern writers have underestimated the freebooters’ palates. The notorious Captain Avery, for example, “was one of those who are mightily addicted to Punch.” John Rackham was taken when his ship was surprised while hove too near another vessel so that he and his men could share a bowl with the other crew. The psychopathic Ned Low kept a two-gallon silver Punch bowl of which he made frequent use (such luxuries are easier to maintain if you don’t have to pay for them). When one of his more genteel captives declined to split a smaller bowl with him, Low picked it up in one hand and a cocked pistol in the other and offered him a stark choice: drink with a murderer or die. We may assume that he took the bowl.

Good Americans, the pirates liked a little lubrication when they had official business to conduct. The mutineer Howell Davis was elected captain at a council of war “called over a large Bowl of Punch,” and Bartholomew Roberts, who succeeded to his office after Davis was ambushed by the Portuguese, was elected in the same manner. When he had a disciplinary problem, Roberts would call a hearing and, over the customary pipes and “large Bowl of Rum Punch,” he and his officers would hear the evidence, consult the law and generally keep up “the Form of Justice”—which, as Johnson wrote, “is as much as can be said of several other Courts that have more lawful Commissions for what they do.” (Roberts’s crew once tried to recruit a clergyman by “promising he should do nothing for his Money but make Punch, and say Prayers”—note the order. For whatever reason, he declined.)

Rum Punch wasn’t restricted to pirates, of course; it belonged to sailors in general, as discussed in Book I. Between the colonial connotations and the nautical ones, you might expect that it would get high-hatted in the mother country, that to drink it would brand one as a hick and a rube and a ruffian. And yet that did not happen, due in large part to two forces that trump even class anxiety: patriotism and greed. Unlike arrack or brandy, which were made by foreigners in foreign lands and had to be bought with good British gold that then stayed in foreign pockets, rum was made by Britons in lands that were nominally British, and thus any gold spent on it ended up in British pockets—and some very high and deep pockets at that. The dynamic is aptly summed up in a 1772 letter to
Town and Country Magazine
giving the character of one “Mr. Prywell,” who “considers it as high treason to drink brandy punch, being a complete Antigallician [i.e., French-hater], and having the rum trade, and the good of the West-India islands strongly at heart.”

It wasn’t just the powerful interests on rum’s side that made it popular in Punch (although they might have had something to do with the way medical writers kept proclaiming it the most wholesome and least harmful of all spirits). It was also delicious, at least when well made and properly aged—“in order to make Rum palatable to any Person of nice Taste,” one expert opined during the 1737 Gin Act debates, “it must be carefully kept in a good Cellar for several Years”—with much of the twang of Batavia arrack but a richer, smoother body. If not well made or aged, Ned Ward’s description of it as “that damn’d Devil’s Piss” might have been closer to the truth, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, there was plenty of good rum to be had. And if you formed an
entente cordiale avant la lettre
and teamed it up with real French brandy, so much the better: the brandy smoothed out the rum, and the rum added savor to the brandy.

Not everyone was so adventurous, at least not right away: looking through Punch recipes from the early eighteenth century, it seems like there was a general sentiment of “when I drinks brandy I drinks brandy, when I drinks rum I drinks rum.” Not until the second half of the century does a mixed Punch begin popping up. In 1763, the
St. James Magazine
could mention “hot rum and brandy-punch” without pausing to explain. And if the unhinged, dissipated and violent Stephen Fovargue (among other things, he horsewhipped a Cambridge servant to death) could claim in his eccentric 1767 book of opinions on matters sporting and musical,
The New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors
, that a “charming Bowl of Rum and Brandy Punch mixed” could “inspire . . . with generous sentiments,” his counterexample didn’t wreck its career. By the early nineteenth century, it was utterly unobjectionable, and many of the best authorities insisted on it.

But on to the Punches. Here are five recipes for Brandy Punch, Rum Punch, and Brandy and Rum Punch that are all about the generous sentiments, and no horsewhipping.