Punch (3 page)

But neither have I included every genuine Punch that wormed its way into an old book. If a recipe is here, it’s because it’s historically important, it helps illustrate the techniques and practices of the Punch-maker’s art or it’s just plain delicious. Almost always, it’s some combination of the three. I’ve tried to get all the famous ones, at least; if it’s not here, it’s because I couldn’t find a definitive recipe for it. For instance, as delightful as it may be, you won’t find Charleston’s famed St. Cecelia Society Punch here, since the earliest recipe I’ve been able to find is from 1939, and it bears marks of tampering. For many another, I couldn’t find even that much. The most famous Punches tended to be associated with clubs, and as club life waned and the organizations shut up their houses and disbanded, the closely guarded formulae for their characteristic tipples tended to disappear into the memory hole. But who knows? With the digital revolution making rich new archives not only available but easily searchable, even from your cell phone, such deeply buried secrets might very well make their way back to the shores of light.

It’s my fondest hope that anyone who reads this book will feel that it has rendered him or her fully capable of sizing up whatever the archives should disgorge and reducing it to a shopping list and a set of procedures. To that end, on top of the forty-odd Punch recipes you’ll find here, I’ve also supplied as thorough a course in the fundamentals of Punch-making as I can provide, including notes on formulae, techniques, ingredients and equipment. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll always have Fish-House Punch.

Finally, you will find a lot of very bad spelling in these pages. In stitching my text together from the hundreds of sources I’ve consulted, I’ve always tried to follow the motto of the Royal Society,
Nullius in verba
—“Take no one’s word for it.” Rather than rely on other, less Punch-obsessed authors’ evaluations and interpretations of the historical evidence, I’ve done my best to draw on original, primary sources. And since English spelling was a matter of opinion and personal preference until well into the eighteenth century, many of those documents show a remarkable freedom with the forms of written English. Rather than beat them all into our narrow modern mold, I’ve chosen to celebrate diversity. If anything has you stumped, read it aloud and it should become clear.

THE HISTORY OF PUNCH

Nobody can say precisely when, where or by whom Punch was invented. That is in fact the default position for popular mixed drinks in general; few of them indeed can produce their birth certificates. But drinks don’t spring out of nowhere, nor do they attain general popularity before their time—before, in other words, they supply a timely, efficient and executable answer, a best answer, to the eternal question, “What should we drink?” The Dry Martini, to consider an example at least somewhat closer to us in time, could have been invented anytime from the 1850s on, when the United States (the land of the Cocktail) began to import French vermouth and English gin in quantity. And yet it wasn’t until the mid 1890s that it achieved popularity, when the increased complexity and sophistication of American city life caused fashionable tipplers to cast about for a less-alcoholic alternative to the highly intoxicating glass of barely tainted straight booze that was the original Cocktail, and the rise of the soda fountain made it imperative that that alternative not be sweet or syrupy. Similarly, to understand the origins of Punch and its rise to popularity, we’ll have to try to figure out what made it necessary.

AQUA VITAE, AQUA MORTIS

In 1575, Louis Le Roy, a French humanist chiefly known for his meticulous and elegant translations of Plato and Aristotle, published a Great Big Book of Everything under the title
De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers
(it was translated into English by Robert Ashley in 1594 as
Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things in the Whole World
). Most of the book is devoted to a study of the cyclical nature of change, in particular as it relates to human civilizations and the institutions that support them. Ultimately, though, Le Roy finds himself forced to concede that some aspects of his own time break the pattern. “To this age,” he writes, “has been reserved the invention of many fine things that look not only to the necessities, but also to the pleasures and embellishments of life.” These things are entirely new, he emphasizes, unknown to the Ancients in any form. Some of them are even powerful enough to destabilize the cycles of history. Le Roy lists only the most salient examples: the printing press, which has spread knowledge with a hitherto unthinkable breadth and rapidity, and the magnetic compass, which has enabled explorers to cross oceans and discover new continents.

There’s one more great, world-changing invention he takes note of, but he hesitates to assign it to the “
belles choses
,” the “fine things,” since “it seems invented rather for the ruin than the benefit of the human race.”

He was referring, of course, to gunpowder, an invention that, according to Le Roy, made obsolete not only all traditional weapons but also the courage and inborn spirit that was needed to wield them (tell that to Sergeant York).

But there was another novelty of the age that he could have mentioned in almost the same words, had he deigned to lower his lofty gaze enough to bring it into view.
Aqua vitae
, it was called; “water of life.”
^c
All of the exhilaration and well-being contained in a quart of honest ale or a pint of good wine, ripped free from the watery and feculent elements that cushioned it and held it in check and concentrated into a glass you could drink off with a single short swallow. As with gunpowder, aqua vitae’s strength could be used for good or ill, to protect or to destroy. Indeed, its dual nature was enshrined in another of its names, the paradoxical
aqua ardens
, “flaming water.”

Its virtues were many. It could be made from materials not otherwise fit for consumption. It took up far less cargo space than other drinks—an important consideration in an age of travel and exploration. The high concentration of alcohol meant that it was essentially sterile and hence more or less immune to the rapid spoilage that affected beer and, to a somewhat lesser extent, wine. The alcohol could also make bad water safe to drink and was wonderfully effective at extracting and preserving the essences of the roots, barks, herbs, spices and other botanical products that made up the bulk of the Renaissance pharmacopoeia. Even when unfortified with other drugs, taken in moderation it was invigorating in a way wine, beer or mead could never be.

On the other side of the ledger stood the fact that fortitude was useless against it. Even the mightiest potsman, a paladin who could match tankards with a whole alehouse full of swag-bellied Falstaffs and outquaff the parcel of them, would see his length measured upon the floor by less liquid than it would take to fill his hat. Traditional ways of drinking would need to be revised in order to accommodate it, lest social chaos ensue. “One should mark oneself when it comes to burnt wine,”
^d
a Nuremberg physician warned in 1493, “and pay all the more attention to learning how to drink it.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the Latinate wags of the day were quick to point out that a more appropriate name for it might be
aqua mortis
, “water of death,” as the Lord Deputy of Ireland did in 1584. If it (usually) didn’t kill men outright, it certainly destroyed the health of those it ensorcelled and reduced them to penury.

Ironically, as a doctor and a German, our cautious Nuremberger was doubly culpable for the problem in the first place. Aqua vitae had begun its career as a drug, a medication, and as such, it followed the classic six stages through which euphoric drugs—that is, the kind that make you feel better whether there’s anything wrong with you or not—pass on their way to acceptance: Investigation, when their powers are determined; Prescription, when theory is put into practice; Self-Medication, when their use becomes preventative; Recreation, when Commerce shows Medicine the door; Repression, when too much of a good thing proves too much; and—a step that is only granted to a precious few—Transcendence, when repression fails and society’s institutions are rebuilt to accommodate the troublesome element, since people have realized that it cannot be dispensed with. This being a drink book and not a history of medicine, we’re less concerned with the first three steps of the process than the last three, and as far as can be determined, it was Germany that first saw that transition from medicinal to recreational use.

I say “as far as can be determined” because unfortunately there exists no truly satisfactory history of the growth of the distilling industry in Europe. In fact, distillation in general has received far less attention than its historical importance would warrant, and I know of no up-to-date, detailed, accurate and comprehensive account of its origins and early fortunes (for a list of the most useful books that do exist, see my “Brief Note on Further Reading” on page 277). This is lamentable but not surprising. Such an enterprise would require expertise in history, chemistry, and archaeology and many years of archival research spanning four continents and documents in Latin, Greek, Arabic, the various branches of High and Low German, Dutch, Old English, Gaelic, Old and Modern French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Old High Norse, Russian, Polish—even Syriac, Persian, Sanskrit and Mandarin Chinese. No doubt I’m forgetting a few. (Welsh? Persian? Lithuanian?) We are unlikely to see any such study soon.

At any rate, from what serious research has been done, we know that while distilled beverages had been used in parts of Asia for a very long time,
^e
if Europeans knew before the eleventh century that one could, with fairly modest effort, isolate and concentrate the intoxicating part of wine, that knowledge was very closely held indeed. The extensive archaeological record of Greco-Roman antiquity and the early Middle Ages yields no traces of distillation at all, while all we find in the written record are mere hints and suggestions, on the order of Pliny the Elder’s offhand remark that, alone of all wines, the highly prized Falernian is “
flamma accenditur
”—“ignited by a flame.” (All wines will do so slightly if heated, so Pliny must have been talking about a wine that would burn at normal temperature. An alcohol-water compound won’t do that unless it has been dosed with chemicals that render it undrinkable or is at least 35 percent alcohol, a concentration unattainable by fermentation alone.)

Even after Europe openly turned its attention to distillation during the so-called Twelfth-Century Renaissance, it took some two hundred years for the technology to break out of medical or scientific (that is to say, alchemical) circles and reach the Self-Medication phase. Once it did, though, it made its presence known: in 1360, for example, the city fathers of Frankfurt felt compelled to pass an ordinance regulating and taxing
der Schnapsteufel
, “the spirits-devil.” By this point, grain-distilling was coming into play, a much cheaper way for northern Europe to produce spirits than by boiling down wines imported from its southern neighbors. Even with that advantage, though, it would take another century for recreational spirits-drinking to become widespread, and still there were holdouts. We can track its progress by the trail of taxes and regulations any new intoxicant leaves behind itself once it is too popular, or too profitable, to ignore. Frankfurt got into the game exceptionally early, but by the end of the next century, the signposts start proliferating. Just a few examples: in 1472, the city of Augsburg began regulating the brandy trade. At more or less the same time, Ivan the Great of Russia was declaring a monopoly on “bread wine”—that is, vodka—sales. In 1496, it was Nuremberg’s turn to crack down, the city fathers declaring that since “
vil Menschen in dieser Statt mit Nieszung Geprannds Weyns ein Merklicher Miszbrauch getrieben
”—“many men in this town have been markedly abusive in their enjoyment of burnt wine”—it could no longer be sold on Sundays and holidays. In 1514, France passed a licensing act; in 1556, England finally did the same—but only in its Irish colony, where it declared aqua vitae “a drink nothing profitable to be daily drunken and used.”