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Whiskey Punch
Rub three or four large lumps of sugar upon the rind of three lemons till the yellow part is taken off, and add more sugar to make up the quantity to six ounces. Put the sugar into a bowl, squeeze upon it the juice of two of the lemons, and pour upon it a pint and a half of boiling water. Stir the mixture till the sugar is dissolved. Add a pint of whiskey, and the punch will be ready for serving.
A hot punch of the simplest construction: sugar carrying lemon oil, acid, water and spirit. The proportions are sound and need almost no adjustment.
- The oleo-saccharumRubbing loaf sugar on the peel until it colours draws the lemon oil into the sugar, which is where nearly all the aroma of this drink lives. Zesting the lemons and muddling the zest into the sugar for a few minutes achieves the same thing if you have no lump sugar.
- Six ounces of sugarThat is weight, roughly 170 g, or a little under a cup of granulated. Against a pint and a half of water and a pint of whiskey it makes a punch that is sweet by current taste; cutting to 4 oz is defensible.
- Imperial pintsCassell's is British, so a pint is 20 fl oz. A pint and a half of water is about 850 ml and the pint of whiskey about 570 ml.
- Only two lemons are squeezedThree lemons are rubbed for their oil, two juiced. The third is not wasted in a working kitchen, but do not add its juice or the balance tips sour.
- Whiskey goes in last, off the heatThe boiling water dissolves the sugar; the spirit is added afterwards so the alcohol and the volatile lemon oils are not driven off. Never boil the assembled punch.
- Which whiskeyNineteenth-century British books used 'whiskey' and 'whisky' inconsistently, so the spelling here is no reliable guide to origin. A pot-still Irish or a blended Scotch both work; heavily peated malts fight the lemon.
- YieldAbout 1.4 litres, or eight to ten small punch glasses. It is potent, near 15 per cent alcohol before it cools and is topped up.
Punch reached Britain from India 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, lemon, water and spice. By the time Cassell's was compiling its dictionary the form had long been domesticated, with rum, brandy and whiskey each claiming a version; whiskey punch in particular was a fixture of Irish and Scottish hospitality, served hot from a bowl on cold evenings and prescribed with some confidence against chills.