Important: Safety Warning
This page contains a formula or preparation using substances now known to be dangerously toxic, such as arsenic, mercury, lead, or cyanide compounds. Exposure to these substances can cause severe poisoning, permanent injury, or death.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Punch Essences
Essence of Rum Punch 53½ lbs. of sugar, 3+ gals. of water.
Boiled almost to the candy degree; add 10 gallon of Lemon juice (to the boiling sugar); stir till getting clear; then put in a clean tub, and when near cool add 5 gallons of good Jamaica am, and filter. By observing the above proportions you can make any kind of punch essence, brandy, whiskey, arrack, or kirschwasser.
Prepared Punch.
Half an ounce of the oil of orange peel, half an ounce of the oil of lemon peel, dissolved in a half pint of spirits, 95 per cent, with two drachms of the oil of bitter almonds; two quarts of lemon or lime juice, three gallons of proof rum, one gallon of proof brandy, and two gallons of syrup; mix them all well together in a cask in such a way that it can be drawn from it; when put into the bowl or glass, add boiling water, as much as the quantity requires, a little hot porter, and lastly, some froth from warm beer, to give it a cream on the top. Never forget that this is the finest way for making punch, as it gives it a very rich appearance.
Wine and Rum Punch.
For the above punches see Appendix, pages 254 to PART XIII.
HOW TO MANUFACTURE EVERY VARIETY OF BITTERS Stoughton Bitters. 12 lbs. dry orange peel, 3 " 1" 16 " Virginia snake root, American saffron, gentian root, 1 66 red saunders wood.
Grind all the above ingredients to a coarse powder, and macerate for ten days in 20 gallons alcohol, 65 per cent; then filter.
Stoughton Bitters. (Another Recipe.) 2 lbs. ginsing, 66 2 gentian root, 1½" dry orange peel, "Virginia snake root, 1 oz. quassia, 1/4 lb. cloves, 3⅛ oz. red saunders wood, 3 gals. alcohol, 95 per cent, 3 “ soft water.
Grind all the ingredients to coarse powder, and infuse ten days, and filter.
Brandy Bitters. 3 lbs. gentian root, dry orange peel, " (208)
This page collects trade formulas for punch essences and bitters — concentrates a nineteenth-century liquor house would compound by the barrel and sell to bars. Two of the ingredients called for are not food, and the transcription itself is unreliable.
- Oil of bitter almondsThe "Prepared Punch" calls for two drachms (about a quarter fluid ounce) of oil of bitter almonds. Unrectified, this is essentially benzaldehyde carrying hydrogen cyanide, and it was a routine source of nineteenth-century poisonings; fatal doses were measured in fractions of a drachm. Nothing in the recipe removes it, and the punch is drunk hot and by the glass, so dosing is uncontrolled.
- Virginia snake rootBoth Stoughton formulas are built on Aristolochia serpentaria. Aristolochic acid is a documented kidney toxin and human carcinogen, and Aristolochia species have been withdrawn from food and supplement use in the US, EU and elsewhere. Ten days' maceration in high-proof alcohol extracts it efficiently.
- Quassia and gentianQuassia and gentian are still used as bittering agents, but only within regulated limits set for commercial beverages. The first Stoughton formula macerates its botanicals — the weights are garbled in the text — in twenty gallons of 65 per cent alcohol; the second uses 3 gallons of 95 per cent alcohol and 3 gallons of water. Either way the result is a concentrate of unknown strength, and the text never specifies a dilution.
- Some bitters quantities are garbledThe rum punch essence proportions were checked against the printed page and read as given. The bitters lists remain damaged, with entries such as "1 66 red saunders wood" and "+ lb. cloves" missing their units, so those figures should not be relied on.
- 95 per cent spiritNeutral spirit at 95 per cent is very high-strength and is restricted or unavailable in some jurisdictions. Its role here is extraction and flavour-carrying, not drinking, and the recipes give no final dilution.
- If you want punch or bittersUse a current recipe from a modern bartending source. These pages are worth reading as documents of how a wholesale liquor house worked, not as working formulas.
Punch essence was a commercial convenience: a shelf-stable concentrate of citrus, sugar and spirit that a publican could dilute with boiling water to produce hot punch in seconds, without keeping fresh lemons or measuring five ingredients per bowl. The name punch is traditionally traced to the Hindi pānch, five, for the sugar, citrus, spirit, water and spice of the drink English sailors and East India Company men brought home in the seventeenth century, though the etymology is disputed. The bitters that follow belong to the same trade. Stoughton's Elixir is generally credited to Richard Stoughton, a London apothecary of the late seventeenth century, whose bitter tonic became one of the earliest English proprietary medicines and then, by the nineteenth century, a bar staple copied by every manufacturer with a maceration tub — which is exactly why a book like this prints two competing versions of it and calls neither one secret.