Punch (37 page)

I have written the drink’s name with a capital “P,” both to distinguish it from the degenerate compounds that have usurped its name and to indicate that it is a specific class of drink. I have done the same throughout with other classes of drink. I don’t know if this fits the canon of literary English, but it is done thus in drink-writing, and I am a drink-writer.

If the Punch is cold, the ice will melt as the afternoon or evening drags on; if it’s hot, the alcohol will slowly steam out. Either way, it will weaken over time, in parallel with the drinker’s judgment. This is not a bad thing.

See Revelation 22:17, which reads in the Vulgate (the Latin Bible used in Europe at the time): “Qui vult accipiat aquam vitae gratis” (rendered in the King James Version as “And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely”). This must have caused no end of hilarity among the Latin-speaking clerks of the day.

“Geprannten weyn,” another of aqua vitae’s many names.

The Chinese had a commercial distilling industry as early as the 600s, as Joseph Needham has shown in the book-length subsection of his magisterial
Science and Civilization in China
devoted to “Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus, Theories and Gifts” (which would be volume V, part 4); however, based on postwar excavations in Pakistan, F. Raymond Allchin has been able to mount a persuasive argument that parts of India had such an industry a good thousand years before that.

The modern convention is to spell this word with an “e” when it refers to something made in Ireland and the United States and without one when it refers to a Scottish, Canadian or Japanese product. This is a very recent rule, however, for a matter of personal preference that recognized no national borders, and since I shall be discussing aged grain distillates from several nations, rather than skipping back and forth like a spelling flea, I’ll stick to “whiskey” throughout.

For the record, “aligant” is a Spanish wine, “minglum-manglum” an adulterated wine of any sort, “purr” a weak cider, “hum” a fortified ale, “mum” a strong beer, “aqua quaquam” strong water of any type and “sacum” sherry.

The English still have a way with naming drinks. As proof, I adduce the Cheeky Vimto, a fairly nauseating mixture of port wine and blue alcopop claimed by its devotees to resemble Vimto, a popular (in Britain, anyway) purple soft drink.

I don’t know if this was the first of its kind in England, but it’s certainly the first cited in the standard sources. I have not been able to establish when it opened or who ran it.

The Dutch had been sniffing around those waters, nominally in the Portuguese sphere of influence, since 1596. They were not happy to have their fellow Protestants and erstwhile allies join them.

Should you seek these places on the map, they are now known respectively as Dugarajupatnam and Nizampatnam.

In 1665, “two senior Captains” of the company estimated that for a month in India, a man would need thirty bottles of Madeira, thirty of beer and fifteen of arrack. Indeed.

“Arach,” “arak,” or however else this protean word is transliterated—“arrack” was the most common in our period—is derived from the Arabic word for “sweat” or “juice” and is generic throughout the Middle East and South, Central and Southeast Asia for a distilled spirit; hence, when used unmodified it is no more useful for identifying precisely what someone is drinking than our “liquor.” Materials it has been distilled from range from raisins and dates in the Middle East to fermented mare’s milk in Mongolia. 5 Lemons, citrons and both sweet and sour oranges were imported in increasing quantity throughout the seventeenth century, as English trade with the Mediterranean and, particularly, Portugal developed. During the same period, the spectacular growth of the Caribbean sugar industry meant that it went from being a rare spice to a culinary staple.

Unlike the still used in western Europe, with its high, bulbous top and external condensing coil, the Chinese still relies on a woklike cover full of cold water to induce condensation, with a cup underneath it, inside the still, to collect what drips off the bottom of the wok. It is then drawn out by a pipe through the side of the pot.

Hawkins got off lightly. Jahangir had others who had imbibed without authorization scourged in front of the court with barbed whips and then beaten with iron bars. And you thought
your
hangovers were bad. . . .

Indeed, in 1622, Pietro della Valle, the scrupulous Italian traveler, found the English in Bandar Abbas, near the Straits of Hormuz, drinking an aqua vitae-based tipple called “Larkin,” which they had picked up in Java. He thought it so “
gagliarda
”—“potent”—and delicious that he had them teach him how to make it, although the recipe itself didn’t make it into his book. It’s worth noting that the company had a man named Robert Larkin in Java at the time.

Some have also thought to derive the name from “puncheon,” a type of barrel, on the theory that spirits were shipped in them. Unfortunately, records do not bear that out, aqua vitae being carried in “runlets,” small kegs of thirteen (U.S.) gallons, while puncheons held from sixty to ninety gallons. Such a container used as a mixing bowl, another theory, would mean that every man in the typical ten-to-twenty-man factory would have had to drink several gallons of Punch; even shared out among a typical Elizabethan ship’s company that would yield between five and eight pints a man. Either quantity would be a paralyzing dose, if not a fatal one.

Indeed, worse things could happen to beer than going sour, as Admiral of the Fleet Edward Russell recorded in 1689 after ten weeks at sea keeping station off the coast of Ireland: “in severall of the buts of beare, great heapes of stuff was found at the bottom of the buts not unlike to mens’ guts, which has alaramed the sea men to a strange degre.”

Oddly enough, the gin-drinking Dutch seem to have stuck to victualing their ships with beer and wine as well, although they may have changed things after the 1595 voyage noted above, when they “learned what meat and drinke we should carrie with us that would keepe good.” They were shipping aqua vitae by 1609, anyway, since Henry Hudson’s men used it to intoxicate the poor Lenapes they found inhabiting Manhattan Island.

He also had a distiller in each of his two main ships, ostensibly to provide fresh water—although who’s to say they couldn’t also whip up some sea-biscuit whiskey?

As one of his men reported, Drake was forced to land early in his circumnavigation to address and attempt to quell “controversy” and “stomaching” between “the sailors and the gentlemen [i.e., the passengers],” which nearly derailed the voyage.

The vendors used an ancestor of the modern bartender’s two-sided jigger to measure out their product: a gill—a quarter pint—on one side, half that on the other.

Despite plague and fire, London drew in enough migrants from the countryside to end the century a far larger and busier place than it had been at its beginning. From a city of two hundred thousand at the death of Elizabeth, in 1603, it grew to half a million by the time William III died ninety-nine years later.

Or—another argument for an English origin of the name—“punch” was a common English word for strong drink of whatever sort that was applied independently to both.