Punch (38 page)

The ordinary, a seventeenth-century response to a society in which increasing numbers of people were working away from home, was essentially an alehouse that served one or two set communal meals a day.

But, as a look through the next century or so of London court records shows, hardly a unique one. Many a man, nautical or otherwise, would be plied with Punch until insensate, robbed and—if lucky—left in the gutter.

Mrs. Behn’s play, though quite Punch-sodden, wasn’t the wettest of its day: in 1693, Henry Higden’s
Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot
didn’t make it past the third act of its one and only performance, “the author having contrived so much drinking of punch in the play, that the actors all got drunk, and were unable to finish it.”

That works out to five or six pints a head. As the
Grub Street Journal
commented, “This Bowl is called with very great propriety a trough.”

Both palm and Batavia arracks were imported, even if it meant paying the hated Dutch for the latter—Charles II had settled the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in part, by giving up almost all English claims and factories in Indonesia and the Spice Islands, receiving in return the rather drab colony of New Amsterdam as a sort of consolation prize.

British vintners had a deplorable habit of fortifying and otherwise adulterating every last drop of wine or winelike substance that passed through their hands. Even claret—good French Bordeaux—received the stiffening shot of brandy and didn’t shake it off until well into the nineteenth century.

Of course, these principles could be applied equally well to mixology in general: strong must be set against weak, sour against sweet, yet with the whole in a state of dynamic tension wherein the contrasting ingredients are not completely neutralized to the point of being “homogeneal.”

Drinks writing has few terms of art entirely its own; this is one of them, and it is indispensable. It simply means “it makes you want to drink more of it.”

This method, it must be acknowledged, can be surprisingly accurate; there are, for example, village distillers in Oaxaca who even today produce spirits of a consistent proof without using any measuring tools whatsoever.

In the early Punch years in particular, if he couldn’t get cognac, he’d be happy to settle for “Nantz,” from the then-booming distilling region around Nantes.

I should note that there is such a thing as too much hogo. I can recall a couple of cases in my experience—a clairin from Haiti and a pot-stilled sugarcane-juice rum from Grenada of great authenticity—where I not only threw in the towel but burned it to get rid of the smell.

In 1694, the Ironmonger’s Company Records contain notice of a Punch bowl made with a removable, scalloped rim so that it could also be used as a “monteith,” a then-popular style of bowl used for carrying wineglasses to the table, washing them and cooling them (the stems of the glasses fit in the indentations, with the business ends resting in the cool water within and the bases hanging high and dry outside). This double-duty style of bowl became widely popular.

By “wrote” here I mean “plagiarized,” as the comment was swiped verbatim from Gibbons Merle’s 1842
Domestic Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Manual
.

For example, a U.S. ounce is actually only .96 of an imperial ounce. Let’s just ignore that, shall we?

In 1776, Sweden put it at the head of a list of prohibited foreign luxuries. That prohibition didn’t take, and bottled Arrack Punch base became one of the characteristic drinks of the Swedish people, only to be eclipsed by vodka in the late twentieth century.

This might be a nominal price, but it wasn’t entirely nominal: the inventory of Wetherburn’s tavern made upon his death in 1760 values his arrack at a hefty one pound, or twenty shillings, a gallon, wholesale. Unfortunately, history is silent as to how big that bowl was, but colonial taverns definitely stocked ones far larger than the standard single, double and treble: William Black, visiting Philadelphia in 1744, recorded in his diary a literally staggering regimen of Punch morning, noon and night, all served in bowls “big enough for a goose to swim in.” Wetherburn’s largest Punch bowl thus could have held as much as eight or ten gallons, with a third of that being arrack. Considering that his tavern was the best in town and no doubt marked its booze up accordingly, that bowl of Punch may have cost ten pounds—making Randolph’s gesture to Thomas Jefferson’s father the eighteenth-century equivalent of charging a night of bottle service at a New York nightclub today.

Modern-day Bengkulu City, on the southeast coast of Sumatra, where the British established their last toehold in the archipelago in 1685.

The fact that the author of the continuation clearly doesn’t know what “rack” or “lime” mean in his recipe, conflating them as he does into the nonsensical “rack-lime,” which he explains as “lime-water,” suggests that Kirkman and not Head wrote the passage, since Head got that part right in the original book.

The interjections of “such a day” here are generally and wrongly interpreted as exclamations; they are, in fact, the editor’s way of saying “day
x
” and “day
y
,” rather than reproducing actual dates from the ship’s log—if, indeed, he didn’t make the whole thing up in the first place.

In fact, Mackenzie appended a slightly altered version of the same note to his edition of “ODoherty,” a note that was reprinted verbatim, down to the final injunction to “Imbibe,” as the recipe for Glasgow Punch in Jerry Thomas’s
Bar-Tenders Guide.

Perhaps the authors were mixed up by the scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s hugely popular farce
She Stoops to Conquer
, in which Bully Dawson is mentioned in the same breath as the insolent Mr. Marlow, who has pretensions as a Punch-maker.

Speaking of the general public and technical language, the recipe right under that one bears repeating: “Take one Quarrt of Sack, half a Pint of Brandy, half a Pint of fair Water, the Juyce of two Limons, and some of the Pill [i.e., peel], so brew them together, with Sugar, and drink it.” The name of this only marginally less intoxicating drink? Not “Punch,” nor “Punch Royal,” but “Limonado.” Huh.

The Cocktails, however, were pinched from the bilingual
Bartender’s Manual
published by the great American mixologist Harry Johnson.

This technique is, in fact, a version of the modern one known as “fat washing,” in which an oil or a fat is mixed with liquor and, after it has contributed its flavor, coagulated (here by refrigeration) and removed.

He was still pronouncing Ashley’s “pretty agreeable” seventeen years later, when he had given up the other sort of amusement;
vinum longum, amor brevis.

Take, for example, the 1734 ad for James Bowman’s Punch house in Bristol, in which its proprietor holds Ashley up as a model and then claims his Punch is “in all Respects to be made to as great Perfection as by . . . Mr. Ashley.” By 1736, there was even a Punch house on Ludgate Hill that copied Ashley’s signage and offered a quart of brandy or rum made into Punch for three shillings fourpence. Ouch.

The takeaway: “Punch! That no mortal man alive wou’d drink, / Had he but Power or Willingness to think.” Evidently Mitchell once drank too much of it.

The Gaelic terms are literal translations of the Latin.

“After supper,” he wrote to a friend, “I for the first time drank whisky punch, the taste of which is harsh and austere, and the smell worse than the taste. . . . The spirit was very fierce and wild, requiring not less than seven times its own quantity of water to tame and subdue it.” Now, admittedly there was much bootlegging at the time, and the potheen was often less than debonair, but the last bit gives him away as a liar, a bigot or a milquetoast. Even if the whiskey he tried was pure alcohol, with it making up an eighth of the total volume, the Punch would have only been 25 proof; and in fact Campbell states that the stuff he had wasn’t even the strongest whiskey available; if he was telling the truth about the dilution, the Punch would’ve been about the proof of a strong ale. But I digress.

I suspect that the widespread popularity of this alternate name stems from an uneasiness with the combination of “gin” and “Punch.”

On the other hand, in an 1834 piece in the
New Monthly Magazine
we hear of one Raggett, at the Cocoa Tree (a popular coffeehouse), “who for no price will sell the secret” of his iced Gin Punch; one would like to know more about Mr. Raggett and his secret.

One story of its origin that later circulated fairly extensively involved the pope’s private chef, the Empress Josephine, a Livonian prince and the prince regent. Romantic as it is, it is alas pure horseshit.

To cite one example among many, the 1756 novel
The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates
, which influenced Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, has people at one point drinking bottled “Arrack Punch made with Green-tea.”