The Spirits: A Dickens of a punch

Richard Godwin's cocktail adventures
25 October 2012

On a damp and chilly London evening, a hot punch was being served above the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields.

The steam curled over the teacups as sweet spice wafted around the room. A well-dressed man from the gin company read from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. The theme of the evening was gin in literature and the concoction we were about to taste was inspired by Mr Micawber, a notable punch-drinker.

“I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning rum, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr Micawber did that afternoon,” Dickens writes, through Copperfield’s eyes. “It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.”

I was reminded of a passage in Peter Hitchens’ Drugs: The War We Never Fought, in which the conservative columnist complains young people today are so intoxicated and uneducated, they don’t know who Mr Micawber is. And yet, here they were, with their waxed moustaches and incomprehensible media jobs, toasting him and consuming his punch.

The punch was a little sweet for my taste — is there something wrong with my palate, or is everything too sweet these days: Kit Kats, cupcakes, Alastair Campbell? Since it was made with Hendrick’s gin and madeira wine, it was not strictly accurate, either — as Dickens’s own preferred recipe involved dark rum and brandy.

However, it had a warming, spicy sugariness and a lovely juniper kick that made one want to slither into armchairs and laugh heartily. For all the horrors of Victorian London, it clearly did cosiness well, I thought, wiping the mist from the window and looking at what the developers have done to Old Spitalfields market.

Punch is one of the oldest convivial drinks known to man, and it is, sadly, a dying art. Occasionally, at a certain type of house party, someone will make “punch” — but it is usually disgusting.

Still, Dickens was already complaining about the decline of the punch ritual back in the 19th century, when Queen Victoria clamped down on such things. Like Micawber, he made a grand ceremony of warming lemon rinds in rum and brandy, lighting the concoction with a wax taper, before adding sugar and boiling water. Nostalgia is clearly another fine Victorian invention.

To revive the ritual in time for the house party season, we should go back to basics. There are five elements to punch: sourness, sweetness, alcohol, dilution and spice. The old mnemonic “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak” is a useful rhyme for most situations. It can be adapted any old how — say, one part lemon or lime juice; two parts liqueur or sugar syrup; three parts spirit; and four parts water or tea, with spice to taste.

In Jerry Thomas’s famous 1862 book, How to Mix Drinks, he devotes plenty of time to punch, providing 81 recipes. The key to making a punch “of any sort of perfection”, he advises, is to rub the lemon rinds with sugar, to extract their “ambrosial essence”. If you make a hot punch, the spirits should go in first; if cold, they go in last. It should be strong. But in all cases, you should also take care that “neither the bitter, the sweet, the spirit, nor the element, shall be perceptible one over the other”.

This is the grand secret, Thomas writes, “only acquired by practice”.

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