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Milk Punch
Put into a bowl three gills of sweet milk, two tablespoons of sugar, and two of rum, brandy or whiskey. Stir well. Pour this mixture from one bowl to another to froth it. Hold the bowl high as you pour the liquid. When it is frothed. pour it into a tumbler and serve.
A single drink, mixed and aerated by pouring rather than shaking. It comes together in under two minutes and rewards cold ingredients and a heavy hand with the pouring.
- Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups (12 fl oz) of milk. That is a generous single serving; the finished drink will overflow a small tumbler.
- Sweet milkIn period usage "sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk, as opposed to sour milk or buttermilk. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will froth but taste thin.
- The spirit ratioTwo tablespoons is one fluid ounce, against 12 ounces of milk. That is very mild by modern cocktail standards, where 1 1/2 to 2 ounces per drink is usual.
- SugarTwo tablespoons of granulated sugar will not dissolve readily in cold milk. Stir until the grit is gone before you begin pouring, or use superfine sugar or a simple syrup.
- The pouringThis is the whole technique. Pour between two bowls from as great a height as you can manage without splashing, repeating until frothed, so the falling stream drags air into the milk. A cocktail shaker or a milk frother does the same job faster but the drink is meant to be loose and foamy, not stiff.
- TemperatureThe recipe says nothing about chilling, but the drink is only good cold. Use milk straight from the refrigerator and serve at once, since the froth collapses within a minute or two.
- Grating on topMilk punch is conventionally finished with a dusting of grated nutmeg. The book omits it here, but it is the expected garnish and worth adding.
Milk punch is an old form, older than the cocktail proper: recipes for spirits combined with milk, sugar and spice appear in English household books well before 1800, sometimes clarified by curdling the milk with citrus and straining it clear. The simple uncurdled version that survived into American practice became a fixture of New Orleans, where brandy milk punch is still a standard morning drink, and it had a long secondary life as an invalid's and convalescent's beverage, which is likely why a domestic manual like this one carries it at all. The frothing method here, pouring from a height between two vessels, is a technique also long associated with chocolate, and it predates the widespread home use of the shaker.