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Punch, Pony
Take a tea-cupful of very strong green tea. Rub the rind of a fresh lemon upon two or three lumps of sugar, and put them into it; add the strained juice of three lemons, a tea-spoonful of essence of cinnamon, a quarter of a grated nutmeg, half a pound of sugar dissolved in a quarter of a pint of water, a bottle of Chablis made hot, a gill of brandy, a gill of rum, and a wine-glassful of arrack. Mix the punch thoroughly, strain, and serve hot. Time, half an hour to prepare. Sufficient for a little more than a quart of punch.
A hot wine punch of the late Victorian type, built on green tea rather than water. The measures are imperial and the sugar is heavy by modern taste.
- Gill and wine-glassA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or a generous half cup. A wine-glassful in Victorian cookery books is roughly 2 fl oz. So the spirits total about 12 fl oz against a bottle of wine of roughly 26 fl oz.
- Do not boil the wineThe Chablis is "made hot," not simmered. Take it to about 150-160F; past that you drive off the alcohol and the wine turns flat and stewed. Assemble everything off the heat and hold the finished punch warm rather than on a boil.
- Rubbing the rindRubbing lemon zest onto sugar lumps makes what bartenders call oleo-saccharum: the sugar draws the citrus oil out of the peel. Give it a few minutes to weep before adding liquid, and use unwaxed lemons.
- SugarHalf a pound of sugar dissolved in a quarter pint (5 fl oz) of water is a very thick syrup, and it is on top of the rubbed lumps. Against three lemons in roughly 1.4 imperial quarts of liquid this will taste markedly sweet now; adding it in stages to taste is reasonable.
- Essence of cinnamonA concentrated alcoholic flavouring, no longer widely sold, and probably stronger than modern cinnamon extract. A teaspoon of extract, or a short infusion of a bruised cinnamon stick in the hot wine, is a reasonable stand-in.
- ArrackNot a substitute for rum but a distinct spirit: Batavia arrack is distilled from sugarcane and fermented red rice, Sri Lankan arrack from coconut palm sap. Batavia arrack is what English punch recipes of this era often meant, and it supplies a funky, high-toned note.
- Green tea"Very strong" green tea brewed Victorian-style means long steeping and heavy tannin. Modern green teas turn bitter fast; steep at about 175F and lean on quantity of leaf rather than time.
- YieldThe liquids add up to nearer 1.4 imperial quarts (about 57 fl oz) than the 'little more than a quart' stated, so expect eight to ten small servings. Strain through a fine sieve to catch the nutmeg and rind.
Punch reached England through East India Company shipping in the seventeenth century, and its name is generally traced to a Hindi or Sanskrit word for five, for the five elements of spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice; the presence of arrack, an Asian spirit, in a book published in London two centuries later is a fair marker of how durable that lineage was. Tea in place of water was in use by the eighteenth century and remained common in nineteenth-century punches, where the tannin gave body and a little bite to a drink otherwise dominated by sugar. The name "pony" is not explained by Cassell's; a pony was a small measure and a small glass in Victorian drinking usage. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gathered dozens of punch formulas alphabetically, each keyed to a particular spirit or wine, which tells you how much a competent household cook was still expected to make in-house rather than buy.