Punch (21 page)

1696: “two”

Since Radcliffe’s Muse denied him knowledge of the size of Apollo’s pitcher or the volume of sugar in Venus’s loaves, I’ve fallen back on my rules of thumb for each, which dictate using as much sugar as citrus and at least as much water as spirit. The latter can be increased by half if you prefer a less heroic beverage, in which you can extract another thirty-odd servings from the bowl.

Note that in the version of the poem published in 1696, Captain Radcliffe very sensibly doubled the size of Venus’s offering; I have followed that version. At the same time, he also increased the amount of wine and, presumably, brandy (a rundlet holds eighteen gallons; while he is vague as to how much of that actually goes in the bowl, it’s safe to assume it’s more than the two-plus gallons previously called for). In that, I have chosen not to risk singeing my wings.

The sugar can be melted in advance with an equal amount of hot water (which should be subtracted from the water added at the end), in which case it will not have to be pulverized first.

As for that “Langoon.” This, it turns out, is wine shipped from Langon, in the Graves near Sauternes and Barsac. We know that at the time it was a “yellow wine,” as one traveler recorded, and in all likelihood it was sweet. Your best bet is a cheap Sauternes, if there were such a thing. If not, look for a dessert wine from the Loire area, such as a Coteaux du Layon. The wine is here chiefly as a softening agent, to tame the brandy without making the Punch watery. For the brandy, while the gods might have had access to well-aged cognac at the time (who knows what treasures lie racked in Olympian cellars?), it’s highly doubtful that Captain Radcliffe did. A decent VS cognac will do just fine. Radcliffe’s proportion of spirits to wine, two to one, is a common one for Punch Royal and an excellent default position.

For the biscuit, you can either use hardtack or improvise as best you can (in Radcliffe’s day, landlubbers would use toast). Personally, I usually say “Neptune be hanged” and proceed without his assistance, but then again I’m not a seafaring man.

One sensible addition is a large block of ice—let’s call it the gift of Pluto, god of the frigid underworld. In that case, you should use care in adding additional water beyond the 2 gallons called for (you’ll also need a larger bowl).

This recipe yields some 88 cups, or 5½ gallons. For a less Olympian quantity, try: one 750-milliliter bottle of wine, two 750-milliliter bottles of brandy, 8 ounces of lemon juice, 8 ounces of sugar, 1½ to 2 quarts of water and about a third of a nutmeg.

If you thought the last one was large . . .

As the year 1694 wound down, for the first time in its history the English fleet did not sail back home to go into winter quarters. Instead, it put into the southern Spanish port of Cádiz, from where it could keep the bulk of the French fleet bottled up in the Mediterranean (England and Spain were then both at war with France). It was an effective strategy, but as the naval historian Michael Lewis notes, Admiral Edward Russell, the fleet’s impressively ill-tempered commander, rather balked at the idea: “I am at present under a doubt with myself whether it is not better to die,” as the admiral wrote his bosses at the Admiralty. I don’t know if it was despite his irritation or to spite the men who caused it, but on Christmas Day 1694, Lord Russell threw a huge party in the garden of a house belonging to Don Francisco de Velasco y Tovar, governor of Cádiz, which he had taken over for the winter. If the Admiralty wanted him to stay away from home, let it pay for his amusements.

News of his “extraordinary feast” traveled quickly; by February, it was all over London. “150 dishes—the first course an Ox rusted whole; . . . the Admiral had 800 men to wayt on him,” one Londoner wrote to his cousin in the country; “this was amazing to the Spaniards.” Well, okay, it wasn’t just the food and the entourage that amazed the Iberian grandees and “all the English and Dutch merchants and officers, belonging to the fleet” who attended (as Dr. William Oliver, who was there, described the crowd), or the neat and shipshape way that everything was arrayed on four long tables, each running the length of one of the walkways, all shaded with lemon and orange trees, that radiated from the center of the garden.

What really got people’s attention was what lay at the center of the garden: the large, Delft-tiled fountain with the canopy rigged over it, filled with “12 hoggsheads of punch.” And, of course, the “little boy that was in a boat swimming on the punch sea and deliver[ing] it to the Company.”

If there’s one item of drink-related memorabilia I could have, it wouldn’t be Jerry Thomas’s lost second book or his silver bar kit; it wouldn’t be Charles Dickens’s nutmeg grater or Captain Morris’s Punch ladle or even the toddy stick used by Orsamus Willard—America’s first celebrity bartender—behind the bar at the City Hotel. It would be that little boat, knocked together by ships’ carpenters, crewed by a boy bred to the sea and christened in an ungodly huge batch of Punch Royal.

After Russell and the guests of quality toasted one another’s health to the point of satiety, as Dr. Oliver recalled,

For Russell, the day was a success. Reporting back to London on his general progress with the Spaniards, “I may say,” he wrote, “without appearing vain, I have settled . . . myself as much in the Spaniards’ esteem, as I could do.” Indeed.

We’re unusually lucky in having not just one detailed account of what went into that fountain but two: Dr. Oliver’s, first printed in an almanac for 1711, and a second, better-known one, which I have been unable to trace back further than 1772, when it appeared in the
Edinburgh Advertiser
. Although this second one begins with an obvious error, placing the feast on October 25th, it has details that Oliver’s lacks and can’t be dismissed out of hand. That’s unfortunate when it comes to the actual Punch, since both accounts, while agreeing broadly on its basic ingredients, differ widely on the important matter of proportion (and both differ on the matter of total quantity with Richard Lapthorne, the man who wrote his cousin about it, each of them making some one thousand gallons, give or take, or one and a half times his twelve hogsheads). To paraphrase one of the principles of textual scholarship, when there are two recipes, there are none. I have therefore given both and suggested a method of proceeding that takes each into account. Since it would be silly to suggest that this be made full size, I have broken my rule and given what is, as it were, a scale model of Admiral Russell’s Punch. The standard scale for ship models these days appears to be 1/700, so that’s what I’ve used.

There was in the middle of a garden of lemons and oranges . . . a fountain which was set with Dutch tiles in the bottom and sides, and was made as clean as a Japan punchbowl. In this fountain, on Christmas-day, was poured six butts of water, half a hogshead of strong mountain Malaga wine, two hundred gallons of brandy, six hundredweight of sugar, twelve thousand lemons, and nutmegs and sugar in proportion.

In the said fountain were the following ingredients, viz. four hogsheads of brandy, eight hogsheads of water, 25,000 lemons, 20 gallons of lime juice, 1300 weight of fine white Lisbon sugar, 5 pound of grated nutmegs, 300 toasted biscuits, and last a pipe of dry Mountain Malaga.

Aside from the fact that you’d need eight hundred sailors squeezing lemons, the admiral’s Punch was pretty straightforward. The strong and/or dry Mountain Malaga is a bit of a problem, though. If you can get Montilla, a Spanish fortified wine that isn’t sherry, it will work well. If not, sherry or Madeira also works very well. This recipe is fairly strong and could tolerate another 2 to 4 cups water or ice. If you wish to add ice, though, you might want to omit the rowboat, to avoid any maudlin
Titanic
moments. The Playmobil set you’re looking for is number 4295.

The life of the scuffling writer has always been a difficult one, distinguished by hard work for sums of money that are rarely more than nominal, perpetual frustration at the squandering of one’s gifts and all-consuming envy of those who do the same thing but with more success. Sometimes all of that makes one do things that aren’t very nice. Take the person who, in or around 1701, compiled the pamphlet subtitled
A New and Easie Way to Make Twenty-Three Sorts of Wine, Equal to That of France
. Fair enough. But he (or she, I suppose, although that’s far less likely) tacked
The Way to Get Wealth
on the front of it as the title. Not cool. In 1697, you see, Thomas Tryon had published a book by the name of
England’s Grandeur and Way to Get Wealth, or Promotion of Trade Made Easy and Lands Advanced
. Tryon, you might recall, was a staunch advocate of temperance and foe of Punch. And yet, there on page 62 of the 1701 volume is a recipe for “Punch Royal.” What’s worse, the pamphlet has been passed off as one of Tryon’s ever since. What’s even worse than that, the person who so traduced Tryon’s ideals may well have been Tryon himself (the pamphlet says, right there on the cover, that it is by the author of a book that Tryon indisputably wrote, although such claims were often falsified). As I said, the pressures of Grub Street can make people do things that they’re not proud of.

The recipe, at least, is—with certain key modifications—a good one, spicy and rich. Indeed, it’s the most elaborate, and elaborately spiced, Punch recipe of the early years. Too bad that it was stolen, with small alterations, from John Yarworth’s 1690
New Treatise of Artificial Wines
. Grub Street.