Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sportsman's Punch
Sportsman's Punch
Boil together a pint of water and four ounces of lump sugar, add the thin rind and strained juice of half a lemon. Pour the syrup into a hot jug, add a pint of whiskey and a wine-glassful of old pale brandy cold, and half as much old ale boiling hot. Serve at once.
A hot whisky punch built on a sugar syrup rather than plain water, so it needs no stirring at the table. The only real technique is temperature control: the spirit goes in off the heat.
- Pints are imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint of water and a pint of whiskey are each 2 1/2 US cups. Added together, syrup, spirits and ale come to a little over 2 imperial pints — about a quart and a half in US measure, a jugful to be shared round rather than a drink for one.
- A wine-glassfulIn late Victorian recipe books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz. "Half as much" old ale is therefore about 1 fl oz, which is a seasoning rather than an ingredient.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was simply refined white sugar broken from a cone or pressed into cubes. Four ounces of granulated sugar by weight (a generous 1/2 cup) is the same thing.
- Do not boil the spiritThe syrup is boiled, then poured into a hot jug and the whiskey added off the heat. Bringing the finished punch back to a simmer drives off alcohol and coarsens the aroma; the jug and the hot syrup are meant to do all the heating.
- Rind, not zest and pith"Thin rind" means the coloured peel pared away with a knife, leaving the white pith behind. Pith turns a hot punch bitter.
- Old aleA strong, long-matured dark English ale — nearest modern equivalents are an old ale or barley wine. It is there for malt depth, and a thin lager will contribute nothing.
- StrengthWith a pint of whisky and no dilution beyond the pint of syrup, this lands nearer the strength of a fortified wine than of table wine. Serve in small glasses, hot, and at once as the recipe directs.
Hot punch of this kind — spirit, sugar, lemon and boiling liquid — was the standard British and Irish nightcap through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made in a jug to be handed round after a cold day out. The word punch is generally traced to Hindi or Sanskrit words for "five", after the five elements of the original Anglo-Indian drink: spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice. What distinguishes this version is the splash of old ale, which recalls older ale-based drinks such as wassail and flip, where hot strong beer rather than water carried the sugar and spirit.