Home › The Principles of Cookery › Punch, for Hot Weather
Punch, for Hot Weather
Put a dozen small sprigs of early mint into a large tumbler, and sprinkle over them a table-spoonful of white powdered sugar. Fill up a third of the glass with peach brandy and French brandy in equal proportions, and add as much pounded ice as the tumbler with contain. Rub the rim of the tumbler with a slice of fresh pine-apple, and drink the contents as the ice melts. If the brandy is not at hand, a glassful of sherry and a glassful of gin may be substituted for it, and an inch or two of orange-rind may be added as flavouring.
This is a mint julep under another name, written for a tumbler rather than a measured jigger. The proportions are given by fractions of the glass, so the strength depends entirely on the size of tumbler you reach for.
- Scale the glassA Victorian "large tumbler" was commonly around half a pint, say 10-12 fl oz, though sizes were not standardised. A third of that is 3-4 fl oz of spirit, a stiff drink by any standard; a 6-8 oz glass gives a more familiar 2-2.7 oz pour.
- Peach brandyThe original means a distilled peach spirit, not the sweet peach-flavoured liqueur sold under that name today. Substituting the liqueur will make the drink markedly sweeter, so cut the sugar back.
- Pounded iceCrushed ice is the point, not a convenience. It chills fast and dilutes steadily, which is what makes the drink drinkable at that strength as it melts. Cubes will leave you with something far hotter and harsher.
- The mintSprinkling sugar over the sprigs and leaving them is gentler than muddling. Bruising the leaves only lightly is the usual advice; hard tearing or grinding is widely said to make the drink grassy and bitter.
- Powdered sugarWhite powdered sugar here is caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves in cold spirit. Modern icing sugar contains cornflour and will cloud the drink; sugar syrup in an amount equivalent to the tablespoon of sugar does the job cleanly.
- The pineapple rimRubbing the rim with fresh pineapple leaves an aromatic film you meet at every sip. Tinned pineapple lacks the fresh volatile scent and will not give the same effect.
- The substitutionSherry and gin in place of brandy makes a quite different and rather less balanced drink; the recipe offers the orange rind simply "as flavouring." Treat it as a separate recipe rather than an equivalent.
- YieldOne tumbler, one drinker. It does not scale into a punch bowl -- the crushed ice and the drink-as-it-melts method are what hold it together.
Despite the title, this is the julep: sugar, mint, crushed ice and spirit in a tumbler, a form generally traced to the American South in the early nineteenth century and copied in British books once ice became more readily available. The peach brandy is suggestive -- American juleps of the period often used peach spirit alongside or instead of cognac. It appears here among hot-weather drinks; imported ice, shipped from Norway and North America and stored in ice wells, had by the later nineteenth century become cheap enough for domestic use. The alternative with sherry and gin reads as an improvisation for a cupboard that held no brandy.