Home › Fruit Punches › Ginger Nectar
Ginger Nectar
To one pint of molasses add two heaping teaspoonfuls of ginger. Stir until well blended, and add a gallon of water and enough cider vinegar to make it rather acid. Chill, and serve.
This is switchel — haymakers' punch — under a genteel name. The whole recipe hangs on the vinegar, which is given by taste rather than by measure, so add it slowly and stop when the sweetness turns bright rather than sour.
- YieldA pint of molasses plus a gallon of water makes roughly 4 1/2 quarts, or 16 to 18 servings over ice. Halve or quarter it freely; the proportions scale directly.
- Which molassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap and not sorghum. Blackstrap is bitter and mineral-heavy and will fight the ginger; sorghum is thinner and sweeter and gives a different drink entirely.
- Ginger"Two heaping teaspoonfuls" almost certainly means dried ground ginger, the usual pantry form in a book of this period. It will not dissolve — it stays in suspension and settles, so stir or shake before pouring. About 2 tablespoons of finely grated fresh ginger, strained out after an hour, gives a cleaner and hotter result.
- "Rather acid"This is the one genuinely vague direction and it is the point of the drink. Start with 1/4 cup of cider vinegar per gallon and work up; most palates land somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup. Add it after the water, tasting as you go, since a gallon of over-soured punch is not easily rescued.
- Blend the molasses firstStir the ginger into the undiluted molasses as written, before any water goes in. Molasses is stiff enough to grip the powder; dumped into a gallon of water, the ginger clumps and floats.
- Let it standChilling for two or three hours does more than cool it. The ginger heat needs time to move into the liquid, and the vinegar edge softens as it sits.
- ServingServe very cold over ice, and stir the pitcher each time. A lemon wheel or a sprig of mint would not be out of place, though the original asks for neither.
Switchel is one of the oldest American field drinks — molasses, water, ginger and vinegar, in whatever proportions the household kept — and it is generally traced to the eighteenth-century Northeast, where it was carried out to hay-makers in a stone jug because it quenched thirst better than plain water and cost almost nothing. The ginger was believed to keep cold water from cramping a hot worker, a piece of folk physiology that long outlasted any evidence for it. What makes this version worth noticing is the name: an old farm ration rechristened "Ginger Nectar." The vinegar was doing the work that a fermented cider or a shrub would otherwise have done, supplying the sharpness that keeps a sweet drink from cloying — the same logic behind the shrubs and vinegar cordials that fill books of this kind.