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Milk Punch
This agreeable summer drink is made in the following manner. Put into a bottle of rum or brandy the thinly-pared rinds of three Seville oranges and three lemons. Cork tightly for two days. Rub off on two pounds of lump sugar the rinds of six lemons, squeeze the juice from the whole of the fruit over the two pounds of sugar, add three quarts of boiling water, one of boiling milk, half a tea-spoonful of grated nutmeg, and mix all thoroughly well together until the sugar is dissolved. Pour in the rum, stir, and strain until clear; bottle closely. It is important in making punch that all the ingredients be perfectly blended together, consequently too much attention cannot be paid to the mixing. Probable cost, 6s.
MILK PUNCH (another way). (See PUNCH, MILK.)
This is clarified milk punch: the boiling milk is not an enrichment but a filter, curdling against the citrus juice and dragging the tannins and cloudiness out with it. Everything else follows from getting that separation and straining right.
- The hinge is the strainOnce the milk hits the acid it will break into a mass of curd. Let it stand until the curd has fully set and settled, then pour through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without stirring or squeezing, returning the first cloudy runnings to the bag. The curd itself is the filter medium; disturbing it is what leaves the punch murky.
- "A bottle of rum"Read this as roughly 75 cl, close to the Victorian "reputed quart". Against three quarts of water and one of milk, and assuming a modern 40 per cent spirit, the finished punch lands somewhere around 6 per cent alcohol; a rum at old proof strength would push it higher. Either way, not enough to preserve it.
- Keeping and yieldRoughly a gallon, or about forty small glasses. Despite "bottle closely," a punch this dilute is a low-alcohol dairy-touched drink: keep it refrigerated and treat it as a matter of weeks, not the months an 18th-century cellar was assumed to give it.
- Lump sugarTwo pounds of loaf or lump sugar equals two pounds of granulated, about 4 1/2 cups. Hard lumps rub the oil out of a lemon rind well; a coarse sugar does the same job.
- Rubbing the rindsThis step makes an oleo-saccharum. Rub, then let the sugar and rind sit half an hour before the juice goes in so the peel oil has time to dissolve into the sugar. It carries most of the aroma of the finished drink.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in the shops only in January and February. Out of season, use ordinary oranges and add a little grapefruit or lime juice for the missing sharpness; sweet orange alone makes the punch flat.
- "The juice from the whole of the fruit"That means the six fruits whose rinds were pared for the spirit (three Seville oranges, three lemons) plus the six lemons rubbed on the sugar -- twelve in all, giving perhaps a pint of juice. Adjust sugar at the end if your lemons are unusually sour.
- Probable cost, 6s.Six shillings was a serious outlay for a late-Victorian household, of the order of a day's wages for a working man. The expense is the spirit and the two pounds of sugar.
Milk punch belongs to the older English punch tradition, in which a spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice were combined in bulk rather than mixed to order; the clarified version is generally traced to the early 18th century, and a much-cited manuscript recipe attributed to Mary Rockett, dated 1711, already describes curdling the punch with hot milk and straining it clear. The point of the technique was practical: strained of its solids and its harsher tannins, the punch turned pale, smooth and remarkably stable, which is why bottles of it travelled on ships and sat in country-house cellars for years. Benjamin Franklin sent a version of the formula to a friend, and the drink remained a fixture of English and American entertaining well into the Victorian period. Cassell's files it here as a household standby for hot weather, a thing made in gallons a few days ahead rather than shaken up for a guest — and the editor's insistence that "too much attention cannot be paid to the mixing" is the last trace of a time when punch-making was a recognised domestic skill.