Punch (30 page)

For the rum, you’ll want at least a Planter’s Best type, if not a Stiggins’s Delight. Whatever you use, it should be rich and smoooooth.

There’s something about the title that drives men a little off the rails. Prince of Wales. It sounds like you’re really in charge of something, but in point of fact you’re not. Your whole job is to wait until your father—or mother—either dies or becomes too feeble to wear the crown, and until then you will be eyed with deep suspicion by that parent and all who are allied to him or her. At the same time, you will be surrounded by people who will do everything in their power to make sure you get anything you want, with the expectation that one day they will be the ones giving some future Prince of Wales the fish-eye. It’s a hell of a job. Some hold up pretty well; others are like George Augustus Frederick, first son of George III.

Sure, it couldn’t have helped his disposition any that his father kept going mad, only to snap back into a precarious sanity just when it looked like the prince would get all the cake. Nobody likes to be teased. But did the prince have to be such a swine? The bigamy, the gluttony, the alcoholism, the pettiness and intrigue—an account of the Regency, when they finally let him run things in his father’s place, and his later reign as George IV makes for pretty gamy reading. He did, though, have one redeeming quality: he had taste. He was unusually sound on art, on poetry, on architecture (although his rococo oriental-themed “Pavilion” at Brighton was a bit of a misstep), not so much on women, but definitely on food and drink. He knew his wines. He knew his brandies. And he definitely knew his Punches.

Regent’s Punch, the formula he had made for himself and his guests on social occasions, was, as one might expect, on the elaborate side. Rather than the canonical five ingredients, it had ten. But while it was as rich and luxurious as one could imagine, it was also balanced and lively. Once people tried it, they wanted more—sometimes to their detriment. The formula’s drawbacks were already well known in 1818, three years after it first appears in print. A satirical 1818 London “Diary of a Dandy” summarizes them neatly: “Saturday—rose at twelve, with a d——d headache.
Mem
. Not to drink the Regent’s Punch after supper.—The green tea keeps one awake.”

Unfortunately for the mixographer, with all “the mad delirious dizziness which follows the delightful excitation of mingled Champagne, green tea, and Eau de Garusse, in the Regent’s punch,” as John Gibson Lockhart quite accurately described its effects, nobody remembered to record for posterity the moment of the Punch’s creation (and no, I don’t know what “Eau de Garusse” is either). Captain Gronow recalled that the Punch was “made from a recipe by his
maitre d’hotel
, Mr Maddison,” but it’s possible that the prince regent himself had a hand in it; he was known to meddle with his potables.

Whoever invented it knew what he was about, although Regent’s Punch was not groundbreaking per se, if one may speak of a mixed drink in such terms. The combination of arrack and tea dated to the reign of the prince’s grandfather or great-grandfather, if not all the way back to East India Company days,
^be
and it was in fact standard in the version of Punch that was causing such a sensation in Paris. The use of liqueurs and syrups was another Parisian limonadier’s specialty. What Regent’s Punch contributes to the art of mixing drinks isn’t novelty, it’s taste. Whoever first compounded it took the best ideas of the old English and new French traditions and wove them together seamlessly into a complex, admittedly fancy Punch that was nonetheless heady and utterly intoxicating, without any of the technical challenges of Punch à la Romaine. It is another of the noble few that will be found relaxing in elegant leisure on Punch’s version of Olympus.

Before long, like most appurtenances of the British high life, Regent’s Punch was in common use in New York. Edgar Allan Poe’s
Gentleman’s Magazine
observed in 1839 that it was “long the fashionable tipple at the symposiums of the
elite
,” and that was true whichever side of the Atlantic you were on. It didn’t hurt that the Yankees had a Tory streak a mile wide and lapped up the royals and their doings like Devonshire cream.

Regent’s Punch maintained some presence in the consciousness of the elegant drinker through the end of the century, making it into a number of the more modern bar guides, if by no means all. But even then, the formulae were degenerate, and like most drinks of its size and complexity, it quietly expired sometime between the Wright Brothers and Sarajevo. Oddly enough, one of its last redoubts was Albany, New York, where it was the traditional banquet-tipple of the state legislature. (Those were the days.)

The recipes for Regent’s Punch are many and varied, a situation in which authenticity is difficult to establish. Fortunately, there are two that each have what is known in Qur’anic studies as an “isnad,” a chain of oral transmission linking them to the Prophet, or in this case the Prince. One of them comes from William Terrington’s 1869
Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks
, in which Terrington labels it “original.” As he credits it to “P. Watier, Royal Lodge, 1820” and a Watier—J.-B., not P., but you can’t have everything—had in fact been the prince’s private chef and had for a time run a gambling club with a Madison (he was listed then as the prince’s page, not maître d’hôtel), he may very well be correct. The other was published in 1845, in
Modern Cookery for Private Families
by Eliza Acton, who says she got it from “a person who made the punch daily for the prince’s table, at Carlton palace, for six months” and that “it . . . may be relied on.” Between these, which differ only in detail, we’re about as close as mixology gets to a certified pedigree. Rather than my usual procedure, I’ll recognize Regent’s Punch as a special case and present both, followed by my attempt to harmonize them.

Punch à la Regent, by P. Watier, Royal Lodge, 1820: original.

—Take 4 oz. of clarified sugar, thin peel of 1 lemon and 1 Seville orange, 1 bottle of dry Champagne, ½ bottle of white brandy, ½ gill of rum, ½ gill of arrack, ½ gill of pineapple syrup, 1 wine-glass of Maraschino; pour 1 quart of boiling water over 2 teaspoonfuls of green tea; let it stand five minutes; strain, and mix with other ingredients; pass through a sieve; let it remain in ice 30 minutes.

The Regent’s, or George The Fourth’s, Punch.

Pare as thin as possible the rinds of two China oranges, of two lemons, and of one Seville orange, and infuse them for an hour in half a pint of thin cold syrup; then add to them the juice of the fruit. Make a pint of strong green tea, sweeten it well with fine sugar, and when it is quite cold, add it to the fruit and syrup, with a glass of the best old Jamaica rum, a glass of brandy, one of arrack, one of pine-apple syrup, and two bottles of Champagne; pass the whole through a fine lawn sieve until it is perfectly clear, then bottle and put it into ice until dinner is served. We are indebted for this receipt to a person who made the punch daily for the prince’s table, at Carlton palace, for six months; it has been in our possession some years, and may be relied on.

Terrington’s “white brandy” is made only by Hennessy these days, and it is only available in France or in duty-free shops; if adventurous, you might want to try a good, smooth pisco. For the rum, we must assume that the prince had access to the oldest, mellowest London dock Jamaica; I like a mix of one part Smith & Cross and three parts of the nectarous Angostura 1919—here the rum must be suave as well as fragrant. If using maraschino, use Luxardo (the prince
loved
maraschino). The easiest way to make pineapple syrup is to prepare a rich simple syrup by stirring 4 cups demerara sugar into 2 cups water over low heat until the sugar is dissolved, letting this syrup cool, adding a pineapple cut up into half-inch chunks and letting it sit overnight. When strained, it will keep refrigerated for at least a week. If this Punch looks like it will be sitting around for a while, it’s a good idea to refrigerate the bowl, or at least add a large block of ice. The historical record holds a great many variations, but many of them bear the marks of economy or expediency and can therefore be ignored. One ingredient that does come up early and often is “bloom raisins,” which were made from sweet grapes from Málaga, Spain. These are steeped in the Punch and then strained out. Worth a try. Use a pound.