Punch (27 page)

The perceived vulgarity of Gin Punch ensured that nothing like a recipe for it appeared during the eighteenth century, or if it did, it was tucked away so safely that I have been unable to find it. However, the sparse notices we do have for it give no indication that any extraordinary procedure was followed in its concoction.

For Cold Holland Gin Punch, use the recipe for Major Bird’s Brandy Punch, with the substitution of a good
corenwijn
or
oude genever
(a category that includes the grey-bottle Bols Genever) for the cognac.

For Hot Holland Gin Punch, use the recipe for Blackwood’s Hot Whiskey Punch, with the same substitution for the usquebaugh.

The American comedian Howard Paul left a detailed description of Charles Dickens’s procedure in manufacturing hot Punch from “old gin” (which could be either Dutch or English; Dickens kept both in his cellar), “lumps of sugar” and “chips of lemon.” Here Dickens omitted the flames found in the recipe he gave his friends, but he still made sure that “the mouth of the jug was closed by stuffing in the napkin, rolled up to do duty as a cork” and set by the fire. “And then the illustrious brewer,” Paul concludes, watch in hand, timed the commingling of the work of his hand. In about six minutes the precious brew was ready to be reverently quaffed, and as he handed me, with a smile, a full tumbler, he kept his eye on my face, as if to watch my first impression.

In a little series of meditations on various matters he published in 1835 as
The Original
, the English essayist Thomas Walker mentioned in passing how gratifying iced Punch was in summer. This prompted a substantial digression by the
London Quarterly
’s reviewer, to whom the world owes a debt of thanks. “Instead of icing punch,” the reviewer writes, “the preferable mode is to mix it with a proportion of iced soda-water.” And then he’s off, touching on the Garrick Club—whose “gin punch . . . is one of the best things we know”; on Stephen Price, the club’s American manager; on Thomas Hill, who was some sort of celebrity; and finally on Theodore Hook, one of the novelists and wits of the day and a man who was known to step high, wide and handsome in matters tipicular (he was Coleridge’s partner-in-crime, you may recall, at their glass-smashing Punch party near Highgate). Hook, it seems, popped into the Garrick one warm afternoon “in that equivocal state of thirstiness which it requires something more than common to quench.” He made his thirst known, and a recommendation was made: try the Gin Punch. He did. A jug was made “under the personal inspection of Mr. Price.” He drank it. Five more were made, one after the other. He drank them, too. Then he shoved off under his own steam and made it to his dinner appointment. Let’s see Jonathan Franzen pull that off.

 

We should focus on Mr. Price for a moment. He was an American, born the year England signed the colonies away. In 1808, the twenty-five-year-old Price was put in charge of running the Park Theatre in New York, the city’s most fashionable theater. He would run it for the next eighteen years. Price was a betting man his whole life, a member in good standing of the so-called Sporting Fraternity. One of his most successful gambles was to import English actors to the New York stage at a time when Anglophobia ran high and loud (he began with the Whiskey Punch-loving Cooke). In 1826, after a most successful run, he decamped for London to take over the management of the renowned Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. There, he was less successful, lasting only two years. In 1831, though, when some well-funded theatrical types started the Garrick Club, they made him its manager. That’s surprising. It’s not just that, according to one who knew him, he was “not a highly educated man, nor the possessor of a very refined taste” or that he “unsparingly larded his conversation” with “coarse and highly objectionable epithets.” He was also prickly, shrewd, brusque and imperious, to the point that Thackeray (a member) caricatured him in his
Book of Snobs
as the beastly “Captain Shindy.” Hardly Garrick material, one would think.

 

On the other hand, he knew a trick with Gin Punch. In New York, he was so famous for drinking “gin and water” while complaining that “the glasses were too small and he had to fill them too often” that the tragedian James William Wallack eventually presented him with a special goblet that held over a quart. The H
₂
O in that “gin and water” probably wasn’t the kind that just sits there. His Punch recipe, you see, which the humanitarian from the
Quarterly
was good enough to print, calls for “iced soda water.” This was something new: while people had been experimenting with carbonated water and Punch since the 1780s, and iced Punch was by that point held in high regard, nobody seems to have put them together before (indeed soda water, a popular hangover cure, was seen as an antidote to Punch, not an accomplice).

We don’t know if Price brought his formula with him from New York, but it’s a good guess,
^bc
what with the American proclivity for iced drinks. Whoever first concocted it, it was a sensation: once outed in the popular
Quarterly
, it spread pretty much everywhere. And with good reason: Price’s formula is utterly seductive, a bright, vastly refreshing tipple that bridges the gap between Punch and the modern long drink. Price himself didn’t live to enjoy the acclaim he deserved: he was back in New York by 1838 and died two years later, but it would be another two decades before his innovation really caught on in his hometown, and then it would bear another man’s name.

Pour half a pint of gin on the outer peel of a lemon, then a little lemon juice, sugar, a glass of maraschino, about a pint and a quarter of water, and two bottles of iced soda water. The result will be three pints of the punch in question.

That “gin” could mean either a Hollands or an Old Tom. I lean toward a Hollands, what with Price being a New Yorker and that being the gin in favor there, but then again Price was an Anglophile and, more importantly, by 1835 English gin was well on its way to dominance in the domestic market, despite a few dissenting voices. Either way, it’s a damn tasty drink. (If you do go with Hollands, use an oude or the Bols Genever, not a corenwijn or jonge). The quantities here require a little precision wrangling. For the gin, you’ll need 10 ounces (remember, we’re dealing with imperial quantities here). “A little lemon juice” is awfully vague; we’ll get back to it in a minute. A glass—presumably a wineglass—of maraschino gives us another 2 ounces. A pint and a quarter of water comes to 25 ounces. Soda water bottles came in two sizes, 6 ounces and the more common 10 ounces; assuming the latter, two of those gives us another (imperial) pint. Total so far: 57 ounces, or 3 ounces shy of 3 imperial pints. So the lemon juice? Three ounces. Sugar? One ounce, more or less, of superfine will do. The
London Quarterly
be damned, I like a block of ice in mine, so I generally remove 10 to 15 ounces of the water to account for that and switch the rest to soda water—thus ending up with a quart of chilled soda providing the entire H
₂
O content of the drink.

In any case, it’s best to begin by lightly muddling the lemon peel in the sugar and maraschino, and then add the gin and the water. Stir, add the ice if you’re using it and pour in the soda water. Done.

In his 1868
Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks
, William Terrington printed eight recipes for Gin Punch, including this one and three simple variations on it, the best of which is “Gin Punch a la Terrington,” for which simply replace the maraschino with green Chartreuse. Indeed, many liqueurs can be substituted successfully for the maraschino here, with interesting results—or try, as Arnold James Cooley suggested in his 1846 recipe “cyclopaedia,” a glass—2 ounces—of sherry (anything but a fino or Manzanilla). I also like to make it with green tea in place of half the soda water—so an American pint of each to 10 ounces gin, plus ice.

Limmer’s Hotel. Where does one begin? In its heyday, which ran from about 1810 to 1850, this narrow old building at the corner of St. George and Conduit streets, just south of Hanover Square, was one of the hottest spots in London. Not everyone went there: it was chiefly a “resort for the sporting world . . . where you heard nothing but the language of the turf, and where men with not very clean hands used to make up their books,” as Captain Gronow, the one-man archive of Regency and late-Georgian gossip, later recalled. Evidently the bookies rather set the tone for Limmer’s standards of hygiene: according to Gronow, it was “the most dirty hotel in London.” No matter; the clientele was frighteningly aristocratic—Byron was a regular, along with half the upper reaches of the army—and couldn’t care less about such bourgeois values as cleanliness or comfort. The rooms were small, dark and unswept. The “coffee-room”—that is, the bar—was “gloomy.” Its clock was the frequent target of the patrons’ late-night pistol practice. The doorman had one leg. There was no closing time. That kind of place.

As long as the action was hot and the establishment kept the nouveaux riches and tradesmen out, which it did with an enthusiasm bordering on cruelty, it could count on upper-crust patronage. Particularly if John Collins (or Collin—accounts differ), the hotel’s plump, cheerful yet dignified old headwaiter, was at hand to fetch a brimming glass of its famous Punch, which was based not on arrack, rum or brandy, or whiskey, but on “blue ruin”—gin.

I’ve written about Mr. Collins in
Imbibe!
and about the chilled, carbonated glasses of Gin Punch that traveled the world under his name. I’ll concentrate here on what Mr. Collins was actually serving at Limmer’s. This task is complicated somewhat by the fact that Collins seems to have known more than one way to make Punch, to judge by the compounds he’s pushing in the brief sketches of him penned by his contemporaries. If he’s offering “Sir Godfrey’s mixture” to one, to another it’s “Mr. Wombwell’s mixture” and to yet another “the Prince of Wales’ mixture,” while a fourth is calling him “that elaborate compounder of whisky punch.” About these we know nothing (well, the penultimate one is probably Regent’s Punch, for which see Chapter XVII).

Everyone else, however, liked the Gin Punch, and indeed that’s the mixture that ended up being associated with him. Unfortunately, authentic notices of it are surprisingly scarce, and it’s difficult to pin down when he perfected it. Indeed, the composition of Mr. Collins’s Gin Punch is one of the enduring mysteries of mixological history: was it the same as the bar drink that bore his name? Just gin, lemon juice and sugar, with soda water and ice? If so, what kind of gin was it? Most American bartenders, anyway, made it with Holland gin; we don’t know what the English ones did, since they didn’t write about it. Holland gin was certainly prized in England, often fetching the same kinds of prices that old cognac did.

There are, however, a couple of hints found in the press of the day that, combined with what we know about John Collinses and Gin Punch, might help us to resurrect it. What follows is of necessity rather close-grained, and since reading it is by no means necessary to the enjoyment of what proves itself to be one of the most delightful drinks ever concocted, a light, floral Punch that makes even the Garrick’s seem coarse in comparison, if you are thirsty, I suggest you skip ahead.

One thing we can conclude is that the gin it was based on was in fact English. That deduction comes from “Wine, a Tale,” a slight piece of fiction written by the prolific and then-popular novelist Catherine Gore, which appeared anonymously in
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
in 1833; in it the narrator, a junior officer in the navy, finds himself at the officers’ mess of one of Her Majesty’s regiments in the eastern Mediterranean. The company is sporty, the talk knowing, and soon “proposals” are made “for a bowl of ‘Gin-Punch!’” One of the lieutenants, who happens to be both a lord and “a masterhand in the scientific brew,” takes charge. The necessaries are assembled: Punch bowl, lemons, the usual. Then the spirits: “a bottle of Hodges’ best . . . appeared in as orderly array as though we had been supping at Limmer’s.”

Mrs. Gore can be counted on to have gotten her details right, the behavior of the privileged being her bread and butter. She got her gin right, anyway, “Hodges full proof” being one of the dominant brands of the period, and one of the pioneering Old Tom gins—indeed, the category might have been named after Tom Chamberlain, Hodges’s master distiller; so said
Notes & Queries
, anyway. The other key to Limmer’s Gin Punch comes from an 1836 piece in the
New Sporting Magazine
titled “The Ascot Cup.” It opens with a what-ho coterie of oh-so-fast Oxford boys discussing the races over “a huge jug of iced punch.” On the table are bottles of “brandy, rum, gin, whiskey, Hollands &c.” and “one large bottle of Capillaire.” In its original French form, this was a syrup thickened with an infusion of maidenhair fern. In English hands, it was usually no more than a thick sugar syrup flavored lightly with orange-flower water. English or French, to our author its presence denotes “the experience of the worthy host with respect to the mysteries of Honest John Collins.”

So. Is the original Limmer’s Gin Punch nothing more than an Old Tom Punch, sweetened with capillaire and chilled with iced soda water? If it is, it goes a long way toward explaining the affection that Mr. Collins elicited from his regulars.