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Hot Milk Punch
Place in large glass a tablespoon sugar, wineglass brandy (if desired use whiskey) and two dashes of Jamaica or St. Croix rum, fill with boiling hot milk, stir well with spoon, grate a little nutmeg over and serve.
A single-serving nightcap that depends entirely on the milk being hot and the glass being able to take it. Little else about it is complicated.
- A wineglassIn American bar books of this era a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, occasionally up to 2 1/2. A dash was never a fixed measure; two dashes of rum amounts to no more than a small splash, a scent rather than a measure.
- Don't actually boil the milkBring whole milk just to a scald, around 180F, when it steams and trembles at the edges. A hard boil throws a skin, catches on the pan bottom and gives the drink a cooked flavour.
- Use a heatproof glassA "large glass" of this period is likely to have meant thick pressed barware. A modern thin-walled tumbler can crack; use a toddy mug, a tempered glass or a heavy ceramic cup, and warm it with hot water first.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the tablespoon of sugar into the spirit before the milk goes in, or work it with a teaspoon of hot water. Sugar dropped into hot milk tends to settle unmixed at the bottom.
- The rums namedJamaica rum meant a pungent, high-ester pot-still spirit; St. Croix rum was lighter and drier. A dark funky Jamaican rum is the closer match to what the writer had in mind.
- NutmegGrate it over the surface at the moment of serving. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of what it is there for, which is aroma rather than flavour.
- Strength and yieldOne drink, carrying roughly 2 fl oz of brandy or whiskey — stiff by current measures. Halving the spirit and keeping the milk quantity gives something closer to a modern nightcap.
- Milk quantity"Fill with" means whatever the glass takes after the spirit, perhaps 5 to 8 fl oz depending on the vessel. Skim milk gives a thin, watery result; whole milk, or a splash of cream, suits the drink better.
Punch reached English kitchens from the East India trade in the seventeenth century, and milk punch — spirit, sugar, spice and milk — was one of its oldest branches, appearing in English recipe books well before 1800. The clarified cold version, in which the milk is curdled with citrus and strained to leave a clear, keeping liquor, was the celebrated form; this hot one is its plainer domestic cousin, a bedtime drink and a sickroom drink, poured for colds, chills and sleeplessness at a time when spirits were still regarded as medicine. Its survival in a general cookbook rather than a bar manual reflects that household role. New Orleans kept the tradition going in its own brandy milk punch, usually served cold, which is often traced to the same family of recipes.a