Punch (22 page)

Take one pound and a half of Loaf Sugar, and dissolve it in two quarts of Water; and if there be any dross in the Sugar, strain the Liquor through Cloth; then add a Pint of Rhenish Wine, six ounces of Limon Juice, or the Juice of four large Limons, seven or eight drops of the true Spirit of Salt, and a Dram of Alkermes or two Grains of Musk, three of Ambergreese, a quart of strong Brandy, and a whole Nutmeg grated, with half an Ounce of Cinnamon, and a quarter of an Ounce of Ginger finely scraped, or beaten; stir these till they are very well mixed, and then head it with good Toast or Sea Bisket; you may likewise, when it is thus prepared, in what quantitie you please, proportionable to these directions, bottle it up, and it will keep long, and drink exceeding brisk.

While the procedure and order of assembly here are clear and correct, the ingredients present some problems for the modern mixologist. For one thing, that’s too much sugar and too little lemon juice. Half that amount of demerara sugar—12 ounces, or 1½ cups—is good; dissolve it in 1 pint boiling water and then add the rest of the water cold (and don’t worry about straining out the dross, unless you want to go super old-school and use piloncillo). Twelve ounces of lemon juice is more like it, but the reason there’s less here might be those drops of the “true Spirit of Salt,” which is otherwise known as hydrogen chloride, or hydrochloric acid. It may safely be omitted. The wine should be a German Riesling. Alkermes, a then-trendy strong water infused with aloe, amber, musk and other such items and colored with the shell of the kermes bug (akin to cochineal), is, incredibly, still made, by the Italian pharmacy of Santa Maria Novella (and several low-budget producers in northern Italy, although I doubt they use the traditional formula). Benedictine works well as a substitute; use a teaspoon. For the ambergris, see Meriton Latroon’s Bantam Punch; use a piece the size of three grains of barley, muddled with 3 ounces of the sugar and 3 ounces of the brandy, which should be VS cognac (for true authenticity, use 45 ounces and subtract 13 ounces from the water). The cinnamon (use one stick) can be ground and sprinkled on top with the nutmeg or muddled in with the sugar. For the biscuit, see Bombay Presidency Punch.

I don’t know exactly how old this recipe is—something very much like it, with less lemon, and rum instead of arrack, shows up in the 1827
Oxford Night Caps
as simply Punch Royal. But I doubt if it’s that recent: like the United Service Punch, which it closely resembles, it’s constructed strictly along eighteenth-century lines, if not seventeenth-century. Whenever it was first concocted, it’s a perfect synthesis, a plush and seductive Punch that practically drinks itself. The arrack adds fragrance and bite to the port; the port, depth and weight to the arrack. How nice when we all get along.

Ruby Punch was never a hugely popular tipple, as far as I can ascertain, but it had its devotees; when a group of New York’s movers and shakers met in 1884 to organize an annual observation of Evacuation Day (the day in 1783 upon which the British army pulled out of New York and the Continental Army marched in), the assorted Jays, De Lanceys, Van Cortlandts, Pells, Gallatins, Barclays, Livingstons and other worthies, whose names are familiar from the street map of New York, toasted the new enterprise in Ruby Punch. Appropriate.

Dissolve, in three pints of hot tea, one pound of sugar; add thereto the juice of six lemons, a pint of arrack, and a pint of port wine.

Since this recipe appears in an American book, let us assume the measures are American, too, and that a pint is sixteen ounces. For the tea, use six tea bags; I like a rich black tea here, but it also works well with green tea. For the port, use a nice ruby (naturally). This is not the place to use that 1966 Delaforce. The arrack should be Batavia. And nutmeg, if ever there was a place for it. This is equally good hot or cold.

There is a long and honorable tradition of Punch-making on the European continent that I am shamelessly and determinedly ignoring in this book. I can only plead lack of space and competence in some of the languages necessary for bringing it to light (my Dutch, like everyone’s, is hopeless). As we’ve seen, Dutch and French sailors learned to drink Punch almost when the English ones did, and they, too, took it home with them. Eventually, the formula spread throughout the spirits-drinking regions of Europe. It didn’t catch on everywhere—in France, it wasn’t until late in the eighteenth century that it became common—but where it did, it sent its roots deep. As we’ve seen, the Scandinavians clung to their Arrack Punch to the very threshold of the twenty-first century. The Germans didn’t stick with it quite that long, nor did they come to it as early as the Dutch (it was still a novelty in parts of Germany as late as the 1760s), but as long as they did, they yielded to nobody in their dedication to the bowl.

If, in general, the Continental versions of Punch were similar to those current in England and her colonies, the Germans proved their dedication by coming up with something rather different:
Feuerzangenbowle
, or “Fire-tongs bowl.” This bears roughly the relationship to Punch Royal that the Blue Blazer does to the Hot Scotch Whiskey Skin: pretty much the same thing, but on fire. You lay a pair of fireplace tongs over a heavy, fireproof pot full of wine and set a loaf of sugar on top of them. Then you soak the sugar with high-proof booze, light it up and let it melt into the pot. The origins of this practice are beyond my ken, although it can be seen as a mashup between Crambambuli, an oddly named liqueur created by melting sugar in flaming brandy or rum that goes back at least to the mid eighteenth century, and mulled wine, which is infinitely older than that. In any case, by 1814 it was a part of the culture, since then we find E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German Romantic to whom we owe that whole Nutcracker business, writing rhapsodically (or however it is that Romantics write) about the “salamanders” bred in the dancing flames of the burning sugar.

The following recipe for “Punchglowbowl” comes from one of the more eccentric relics of the imperial Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a little book titled
Bowls and Punches for the Use of the German Army in the Field and on Maneuvers
. Set in dense, black-letter Gothic type, it oozes heavy Teutonic conviviality. As one scans the recipes for Punches, Cups, Bowls, Crambambulis (or whatever the plural of that is) and even American Cocktails, most of them contributed by the various regiments of the kaiser’s army,
^au
it’s impossible not to hear young male voices raised in hearty song. This particular recipe was contributed by Field Artillery Regiment 67, which would go on to fight on both eastern and western fronts in the Great War, suffering 166 men killed.

In a large earthenware pot heat ten liters light, red country-wine and five liters Arrack, stirring constantly. While it is simmering, stir in a pound of sugar and four Seville oranges or regular oranges, and also two or three lemons, in slices. Having taken special care to ensure that the slices are free of seeds, simmer them in the mixture for five minutes and then pour it into a bowl and serve it flaming. A further dilution through the addition of more light, red country-wine will not obstruct its effectiveness.

The original recipe is clearly voluminous enough to upset the aim of a whole battery of gunners. It also, as the sharp-eyed reader will notice, fails to feature the whole tongs business, in part because it’s simply too large. I have taken the liberty of cutting the recipe by more than half and incorporating the tongs. I’ve also cut the booze down even further. We are not artillerymen in the field now, are we? A Côtes du Rhône works particularly well for the wine here, but anything not too strong, oaky or jammy will do fine. If you can’t get the arrack, use a Pirate Juice-type rum, preferably one at least 55 percent alcohol by volume.