Home › The Principles of Cookery › Punch, Burnt
Punch, Burnt
Stir over the fire a pint and a half of rum a pint and a half of claret, and three-quarters of a pound of sugar. When the sugar is melted, and the mixture boils, pour a pint and a half of boiling water over it and the juice of three lemons. This punch may be drunk either hot or cold: if cold, it should be allowed to stand covered in the saucepan till it is cold, and then be poured into decanters. The zest of the lemons should be rubbed off on the sugar before it is put in.
A hot rum-and-claret punch of the kind Victorian households made in quantity for cold evenings. It scales to roughly five pints of finished liquid, or twelve to sixteen punch cups.
- Rub the zest firstThe last line matters: rub the whole lemons against the sugar until the sugar is yellow and damp, then use that sugar in the pan. This is an oleo-saccharum, and it extracts the aromatic oil from the peel in a way that squeezing juice or dropping in strips of rind will not.
- Weights and measuresThree-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups granulated. The pints are British Imperial, 20 fl oz, so each "pint and a half" is about 3 1/2 US cups rather than 3.
- ClaretClaret meant red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red of moderate tannin works; heavily oaked or jammy wines turn harsh once sugared and heated.
- Alcohol over an open flameThree pints of spirit and wine in an uncovered pan gives off vapour that will catch. Use a wide pan on moderate heat, keep your face away, and have a lid to hand.
- "Boils" means barelyBring it just to the point of movement to dissolve the sugar and no further. Prolonged boiling drives off the alcohol and the lemon aroma, which is the whole point of the drink.
- Juice lastAdd the lemon juice after the boiling water, off the heat if possible. Cooked citrus juice tastes flat and slightly bitter; added at the end it stays bright.
- Serving coldCooling it covered in the pan, as directed, keeps the volatile oils in the liquid rather than in the kitchen. Once decanted it keeps a few days refrigerated, though it will taste noticeably softer than it does hot.
"Burnt" punch takes its name from the practice of setting spirit alight, or at least heating it hard, before the water goes in — the same idea as brandy brûlé and the French brûlot, and a cousin of the flaming bowls served at English colleges and inns. The word punch itself is generally traced to the Hindi panch, five, for the five elements of the original sailors' drink: spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice, a formula that came back to Britain from India in the seventeenth century. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, punch had shifted from a tavern ritual to a domestic one, made on the kitchen range and carried in to a party. The pairing of rum with claret is characteristic of the period.