Punch (24 page)

For a four-shilling bowl, prepare an oleo-saccharum with the peel of four Seville oranges and 1 cup of light raw sugar, such as Florida Crystals. Add 16 ounces of hot water and stir to dissolve sugar. Add 8 ounces of strained Seville orange juice and stir. Add enough water to bring this up to a full quart, pour it into a clean bottle, seal and refrigerate.

To serve, pour a quart of this “sherbett”; a quart of proof-strength (i.e., around 57 percent alcohol by volume) VS-grade cognac, Jamaican rum or (for a six-shilling bowl) Batavia arrack; and a quart of cold water into a bowl and grate nutmeg over the top. If you wish to add ice, add ice. This is enough for one treble, or three-quart, bowl.

WHISKEY PUNCH

Arrack Punch is all well and good if you don’t mind sending your hard-earned £,
s
. and
d
. to foreigners living at the approximate ends of the earth. The same objection applies to “Coniack” and “Nantz,” save that the foreigners are nearer, better armed and much more French. As for “kill-devil,” or rum, it was a domestic product by some standards, but the excise tax on it went to Parliament and the profit to the pockets of those with the where-withal to finance sugarcane plantations three thousand miles across the ocean and man them with slaves. Nothing in any of ’em for the yeomen of Britain, for the farmers.

One man, at least, tried to help them. William of Orange, being a canny Dutchman and thus free from some of the prejudices of the English when it came to potables, pushed a series of acts through Parliament for the encouragement of grain-distilling in England and the discouragement of the importation of foreign wines and spirits. These were effective, up to a point: between 1684 and 1694, English grain-distilling almost doubled, to well over a million gallons a year. And yet the only people who drank this domestic malt spirit were those who could get no better. (We’ll talk about them in the next chapter.) The English opinion of grain spirits remained decidedly low. In 1696, French brandy went for a hundred pounds a barrel, while English malt spirits—essentially, whiskey—fetched less than a quarter of that. As late as 1744, the philosopher George Berkeley, a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, could sniff that “Whiskey is a spirit distilled from malt, the making of which poison, cheap and plenty, as being of our growth, is esteemed, by some unlucky patriots, as a benefit to their country.” Far better to drink “tar-water,” as he recommended. In Ireland, where Berkeley was born and intermittently lived, his was distinctly a minority opinion.

By 1700, the Irish and their fellow Celts the Scots had been drinking aqua vitae made from grain—usquebaugh, uisce beatha, whiskey
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—recreationally for well over two centuries. The Irish in particular gained an early reputation for heroic consumption, but that may be only because the English, having seized the greater part of their country, could observe its population more closely. In any case, by Shakespeare’s day, their spirits-tippling was proverbial: “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter,” says the jealous Master Ford in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, “Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.” Well, okay. But Shakespeare might have had a point about the Irish part, anyway, if we’re to believe James Howell’s description of how they drank the stuff. First off, they weren’t really mixing it with anything. Uisce beatha was a raw grain distillate infused with raisins and spices in the medieval manner. In England, where there were a few, anyway, who appreciated it, it was drunk in “aqua-vitae measures”—basically, shot glasses. In its native land, however, as Howell wrote in 1645, “it goes down . . . by beer glassfuls, being more natural to the nation.”

In Scotland, the consumption seems to have been fully as large but not as well recorded. The fifth of the Statutes of Icolmkill, a set of stipulations negotiated in 1609 between the principal chieftains of the Western Islands, cited as one of the major causes of the continuing barbarity and poverty of their lands “thair extraordinair drinking of strong wynis and acquavitie” brought in among them by merchants. Their solution—to ban the importation of wines and spirits, but allow all men the liberty of brewing “aquavitie and uthir drink to serve thair awne housis”—would only have encouraged whiskey-drinking. As in Ireland, the Scots seem to have drunk their whiskey in infused form, with honey and spices. We must bear in mind that even in undoctored form, what Scotland and Ireland were making was a far cry from what we consider today to be whiskey—the unaged liquor was raw and oily and redolent of peat smoke, and also very strong. Few outsiders could even bring themselves to try it.

A rare exception was Captain Edmund Burt, an English engineer who spent most of the 1730s in the Scottish Highlands. Normally, he avoided the native tipples by traveling with a bottle of his own brandy and the necessary lemons and sugar for Punch. But even the stoutest oak must yield to a gale, and one evening found him in a hut with nothing to drink but river water or the whiskey a parcel of smugglers were transporting down from the glens. Luckily, he still had a few lemons, with which he “so far qualified the ill taste of the spirit as to make it tolerable.” It was not an experiment he repeated; when he was in Inverness, his usual base, or Edinburgh, he could get Punch made with brandy or rum, the same as in London.

By Burt’s day, at least the idea of Punch had reached the Highlands, if not necessarily the precise thing itself. “When they choose to qualify [whiskey] for Punch,” he observed, “they sometimes mix it with water and honey, or with milk and honey; at other times, the mixture is only the aqua vitae, sugar and butter; this they burn till the sugar and butter are dissolved.” (Could this be another hint that “punch” was originally a word for any mixed drink in a bowl?) Indeed, when, at a country inn in the hills outside Inverness, the captain’s servant was squeezing lemons for his master’s Brandy Punch, the landlord asked him quite seriously “if those were apples he was squeezing.” It would be a while before the lemon in any form entered the general run of Scottish country Punch-making; in 1773, Samuel Johnson, touring the Hebrides with Boswell, wrote to his beloved Mrs. Thrale that “their punch is made without lemons, or any substitute.”

That’s understandable, under the circumstances. Until the English built their military roads through the Highlands after the crushed rebellion of 1745, there weren’t even footpaths through most of the region, let alone roads. Hardly less remote were large parts of the Irish countryside, where Punch nonetheless crept in as well. (That seems to have happened between the mid 1740s, when Isaac Butler, in the course of a longish ramble through Ulster, found the whiskey still being drunk in the old style, with mint and butter, and 1775, when Thomas Campbell encountered proper Whiskey Punch in Tipperary.
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) Yet deprivation can teach as well as hinder. Once lemons did become readily available to whiskey-drinkers, there were certainly some who were happy to use them. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, the Edinburgh Infirmary was prescribing, in cases of dropsy, “a quart to four pints a day” of Whiskey Punch, “acidulated with lemon juice” (one might almost wish to be dropsical). And in their absence, there were those who cast about for substitutes: Captain Fancourt, who was stationed in Ireland around the same time, noted that Whiskey Punch was sometimes “acidulated with black currants when lemons were not at hand.” But both groups put together still formed a small minority.