Home › The Principles of Cookery › PUNCH, HOT (another way)
PUNCH, HOT (another way)
Rub two or three lumps of sugar upon the rind of three fresh lemons, or, if preferred, upon two lemons and one Seville orange, until the yellow part is taken off; then add more sugar to make up the weight to six ounces. Put this into the punch-bowl, strain over it the juice of the fruit, and add a pint and a half of boiling water. Stir the mixture until the sugar is dissolved, then add a pint of rum and a glassful of brandy. A spoonful of noyeau will improve the flavour of this punch. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Sufficient for three pints of punch.
A classic oleo-saccharum punch: the flavour lives in the lemon oil pressed out of the peel by the sugar, not in the juice. Get that step right and the rest is assembly.
- The hinge: rubbing the sugarUse hard sugar cubes and work them over the peel until they are visibly yellow and damp with oil, then scrape them into the bowl. Zesting with a rasp is not the same thing; the sugar lifts the oil without the bitter pith and is what gives the punch its perfume.
- Six ounces of sugarThat is by weight, roughly 170 g, or a scant cup of granulated sugar including the rubbed lumps. Against a pint and a half of water and the fruit juice it produces a punch on the sweet side by current taste; you can hold back an ounce and stir more in at the end.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half of water is about 850 ml and the pint of rum about 570 ml. Using US pints throughout keeps the proportions intact, just at a smaller scale.
- "A glassful" of brandyA wine glass in Victorian recipe language is usually taken as about 2 fl oz, but the term is genuinely loose and the book does not define it. Two to three ounces suits the quantities here.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter and rarely stocked outside January and February. If none is to be had, the three lemons work as written; a sweet orange substituted straight will flatten the acidity.
- NoyeauA sweet liqueur flavoured with stone-fruit kernels, sold today as crème de noyaux and usually coloured pink. Modern bottlings are flavoured to be safe to drink; a spoonful adds a marzipan note. Amaretto is the nearest common substitute.
- Keep it hot, not boilingThe boiling water goes in before the spirits so that the sugar dissolves; once the rum and brandy are added, do not return the bowl to the heat. Alcohol and volatile lemon oil are both lost to the steam at well below boiling, and increasingly so as the mixture nears ethanol's boiling point of about 173F. Warm the bowl and the glasses first instead.
- YieldThree imperial pints, near enough 1.7 litres. That is eight to ten small punch cups, and it is strong: better than a third of the liquid is spirit.
Hot punch of this kind was standard cold-weather drinking in Britain from the eighteenth century onward, and Cassell's gives several versions because a punch-bowl was still an ordinary piece of household equipment when the Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s. The word punch is generally traced to a South Asian term for five, the five elements being spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice, though the etymology has been argued over for a long time and the drink in practice took whatever shape the sideboard allowed. What dates this particular recipe is the sugar-rubbing: before commercial flavour extracts were cheap and reliable, abrading the peel with a lump of loaf sugar was the standard domestic way of capturing citrus oil, and the same instruction turns up in period recipes for puddings, custards and cordials. The noyeau, an almond-scented kernel liqueur then common in the drinks cupboard, is a small marker of Victorian taste; it fell out of general use in the twentieth century and has only recently come back into bars.