What is in "punch", England early 19th C

March 31, 2008 10:25 AM

In many of Dickens' novels he talks about "punch". Hot steaming punch on a cold night around the fire. Cold punch at a summer garden party. A ruffled character smelling of tobacco and punch. How was "punch" typically made, what's in it and why was it the popular drink of choice, indeed almost a "punch culture".
posted by stbalbach to Food & Drink (11 answers total)

According to this page (sidebar, about 1/4 of the way down),

"In his notes for the 1907 edition of A Christmas Carol E. Gordon Browne describes this Christmas punch:
The drink is made by pouring red wine, either hot or cold, upon ripe bitter oranges. The liquor is heated or 'mulled' in a vessel with a long funnel, which could be pushed far down into the fire. Sugar and spices (chiefly cloves, star anise, and cinnamon) are added according to taste. It is sometimes called 'purple wine' and received the name 'Bishop' from its colour."

I can't help as far as the rest of your question, I look forward to the answers.
posted by Iamtherealme at 10:44 AM on March 31, 2008

If you can find a copy, this book goes into the matter very fully (and makes you thirsty).
posted by JanetLand at 10:52 AM on March 31, 2008

Oh, man. You ask a very big question... there are chapters, if not entire books, written about this. Before there were cocktails, there was punch. Group servings instead of individual portions. Taverns kept punch bowls, and groups of friends would go in on one together for their own drinking party. It was like heading down to Trader Vic's and splitting a jumbo scorpion bowl with your homies, minus the long straws and umbrellas. Heck, I was reading something just the other day that I think cited Dickens, in fact, on the transition period between punch culture and cocktail culture, when the old punchbowls sat dusty and uncalled for on the back shelf of the tavern... I'll go hunting the shelves in a few minutes, but I'm guessing it was David Wondrich's Imbibe.

As to what was in punch... just look at the punch section of any cocktail guide. There's usually a sheaf of recipes in the back. The traditional formulation, I believe, goes "one part sour, two parts sweet, three parts strong, and four parts weak." The absolute goddamnedbest punch is, in my experience, Fish House Punch. Mix this:

25 oz. Jamaican rum
25 oz. gold rum
25 oz. cognac
24 oz. lemon juice
8 oz. peach schnapps
1 2/3 cups sugar
3 1/2 pints water

and let it stand for several hours at room temperature before serving it over a block of ice. You'll thank me.
posted by mumkin at 10:54 AM on March 31, 2008 [14 favorites]

Punch = wine and/or spirits (especially rum) + spices + fruit + fruit juice + water. Mulled wine could be characterised as a punch. You could even consider the cauldrons of Pimms that were doubtless on offer at this past weekend's Boat Race as a punch, though it's more accurately a fruit cup.

It's associated with that period of colonial expansion and orientalism -- possibly through Indian etymology, possibly through the grog barrel used on ships -- even though wassails and other mass-served drinks have long histories. In cultural terms, it's a way of stretching out the booze, serving lots of people, and making the consumption of alcohol more genteel than ordering pints of port at the ale-house. So it's exotic and social and polite, all at the same time.

The cocktail, which you can characterise as an individual version of the punchbowl, emerged at around the same time, but asserted itself as the upper/middle-class way of bespoke drinking by the late 1800s. There's a nice piece here that points to the evolution.
posted by holgate at 10:58 AM on March 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh, and I shoulda been explicit that Fish House Punch isn't Dickensian. It predates him (1732), and comes from this side of the pond, being the once-secret recipe of The Colony in Schuylkill, a pre-revolutionary Pennsylvanian gentlemen's club (which still exists, by the way). It is, however, my favorite punch. If you haven't occasion to make a full recipe, I would encourage you to reduce it by 75% or so and make a bottle's worth for personal consumption. The peach schnapps should really be peach brandy, but that's hard to find these days in something other than a chemically-based Mr Boston-grade throat-burner.

Anyway, here we go. On the death of punch, from David Wondrich's Imbibe!:

In 1853, Household Words, the magazine edited by Charles Dickens, printed a nostalgic little piece titled "A Bowl of Punch," prompted by the author—the article was unsigned, but it well may have been Dickens himself—going into the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street and finding that the familiar old china Punch bowls that had occuped a shelf in the barroom, all ranked in a row ready for use, had been stacked up in a corner, "as if no longer asked for."

Wondrich attributes the death of punch culture in part to the rise of industrialization, and the commensurate loss of free time to loll about drinking strong spirits for hours on end. He also supposes that improvements in distilling and distribution of liquor meant that booze was, in general, less nasty and more potable without all the sugar and lemon juice and whatnot.

The Dickens citation is useful, I think, insofar as Household Words was a contemporary publication -- the author is commenting on punch's having fallen from favor by the year 1853. I believe that Dickens' fiction tends to be set in a somewhat earlier day than that in which it was published, so if your readings are rife with punchbowls, it may be that Dickens is waxing a bit nostalgic, rather than reporting the tenor of the times. The Flowing Bowl was a popular symbol of hospitality and conviviality, so in the context of cold nights by the fire and garden parties Dickens would've used punch to conjure notions of hearth and largesse and fellowship. Of course, in the example of a rumpled character smelling of tobacco and punch, I'd say the smell is what's most important: dude has the miasma of a dive bar hanging about him, and is thus Not A Person Of Quality.
posted by mumkin at 11:50 AM on March 31, 2008 [2 favorites]

Ha! I hadn't followed holgate's link until now. Wondrich isn't the only guy out there, contrary to the impression we might give, writing on the history of alcoholic beverages. He's most top-of-mind at the moment, though, by virtue of recent publication. And he's quite good.
posted by mumkin at 12:00 PM on March 31, 2008

Oh, you might enjoy Cups and their Customs, an 1863 treatise that's been digitized by Google. Several contemporary punch recipes appear in the recipes section.
posted by mumkin at 12:43 PM on March 31, 2008

Putting on my cultural-materialist cap, you've got different social strands of punch-drinking: the earlier, more genteel one, c-18ish, as reflected in the ornate punchbowl that belongs to a household or club, which later crosses over to the tavern. Thinking of eighteenth-century references in things like the various biographies and anecdotes around Samuel Johnson, punch is the kind of drink you can serve when the ladies are present, as opposed to the pints of claret.

(Here's a nice antiques article on eighteenth-century American punchbowls and their provenance.

Anyone got an OED login to see if 'punch-drunk' predates its boxing use?
posted by holgate at 3:09 PM on March 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

OED sez, 'punch-drunk' first appeared, in a boxing context, in an article in 1912:

1912 Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press (Electronic text) 29 June, Punch-drunk through the first round, and floundering around like a great helpless calf, his mouth and nose shedding blood in a thick stream. 1937 Daily Mirror 2 Mar. 12/4 Nowadays the Kid is punch-drunk. His limbs tremble and quiver like a man stricken with ague. His voice is so slurred that one cannot properly understand what he is saying. 1950 Amer. Jrnl. Surg. 80 708/2 Permanent sequelae comparable to those of the ‘punch drunk’ syndrome. 1974 E. BRAWLEY Rap (1975) I. i. 31 You and me know he's so..punch-drunk he'd do anything anybody told him. 1996 New Scientist 20 Jan. 4/2 Geddes thinks she may have found the earliest stage in a process that eventually leads to the extensive damage seen in punch-drunk boxers. 2004 Curr. Sports Med. Rep. 3 9 For soccer, there has been some concern that heading may be associated with the development of cumulative traumatic brain encephalopathy, or the ‘punch drunk’ syndrome described in boxers.

posted by felix grundy at 3:55 PM on March 31, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks all who replied. They are all "best answers" so I don't want to clutter up the screen and mark every one. Learned a lot here. I'm now a punch convert and will be suggesting it for parties and weddings. It almost seems like a good topic for a popular book, sort of like the recent titles "Cod", or "Salt" or "Banana", or "Sushi" etc.. it would be "Punch: the drink that changed the world".
posted by stbalbach at 7:33 AM on April 4, 2008

Oh, go ahead and mark everything best... someday cortex will devise a freakish mashup engine side-project that will rely on best-answer metadata, and without it, this post won't get included. I completely agree that it's a book-worthy topic. I wish I could make more punch, but honestly, it's hard enough exploring the traditional cocktail without getting shit-faced... punch is definitely something best explored as intended, with boon companions. You should form a weekly punch club.

Also, completely O.T., other N-that-changed-the-worlds I would recommend include Mauve and Rats.
posted by mumkin at 12:23 PM on April 4, 2008