Imbibe! (10 page)

Now comes the problem. Old Tom is completely unavailable; about the best thing to do is take a good, fragrant London Dry and sweeten it. Tanqueray used to make an Old Tom, so why not start there? A half-ounce of gum per bottle should do. As for Hollands. Its import status right now is in flux. I have hopes, though, that it will come back into the American market. What you want is either a
korenwijn
(also spelled
corenwyn
) or an
oude genever
, both of them thick, malty, and divine; the former, in particular, shows the spirit’s surprisingly close kinship with whiskey. Alas, the lighter and more common
jonge genever
is an artifact of World War I, and hence not technically accurate, although it still makes a far richer and tastier plain Cocktail than the lighter English gins.

If, as is unfortunately likely, you have difficulty securing a steady supply of Hollands, the only substitute I know—and it’s not a particularly adequate one—is to mix 8 ounces of John Power & Son or Jameson Irish whiskey with 10 ounces of Plymouth gin and then tip in ½-ounce of rich simple syrup. This works tolerably well in Punches and the like, but less so in Cocktails.

 

 

The Luxardo brand is the gold standard here and always has been.

 

 

Alas, the old style of Jamaica rum, pot-stilled, strong, and redolent of funk, is no longer made in Jamaica (unless, that is, you count Wray & Nephew’s White Overproof, the most popular rum on the island; but this is unaged, and the ones Jerry Thomas called for had some barrel age). The best substitute I know is the Inner Circle, from Australia: it’s a pot-stilled rum of the old school, and it’s glorious. Look for the version sold at 115-proof; the “Green Dot.” Otherwise, Pusser’s Navy Rum is acceptable, as is Gosling’s Black Seal; better than both is an equal-parts mixture of the two.

Santa Cruz rum is more difficult to substitute for because it’s more difficult to pin down exactly what the hell it was. It’s clear that it was lighter than the Jamaican style, but not by how much. In general, I use something like Cruzan Estate Diamond, Mount Gay Eclipse, or Angostura 1919 for this, but I make no claims as to their accuracy. They do make for tasty drinks, though.

 

This one’s easy. While the distillation of bourbon and rye has changed a good deal in terms of scale and a certain amount in terms of technique since the late 1800s, the way the resulting product is aged has changed very little indeed, and experienced whiskeymakers tell me that aging accounts for some 70 to 80 percent of the finished whiskey’s flavor. Good enough. In short, any bourbon or rye aged between four and fifteen years and bottled at 90 proof or above will work just fine (anything at lower proof would have generated adverse comment and, most likely, shooting). For the very earliest drinks here, though, you’ll have to lay out a little more money and pick up a bottle of Old Potrero, which is a wonderfully archaic pot-stilled rye whiskey (in fact, there are two kinds, one aged in uncharred barrels in the eighteenth-century style and one in nineteenth-century-style charred barrels).

For Scotch whisky, you’ll want something strong and smoky and single-malty. The Laphroaig cask-strength and the Talisker both fit the bill. For drinks from the very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, you’ll want a blended Scotch. I like White Horse or Johnnie Walker.

For Irish whiskey, it’s all about the pot-still, which makes the Redbreast your man.

Finally, whiskey geeks might be interested to know that the convention by which American and Irish varieties of the stuff are spelled with an
e
and Scotch and Canadian without is entirely a modern invention.

The quantities prescribed in Jerry Thomas’s book and those of his contemporaries and immediate successors are not only inconsistent between the various books, but within them as well. Mixologists tended to pick up recipes from all over and few bothered to straighten out little differences in recipe-writing styles.

There are some small-scale measures that were never fully standardized. The “wineglass”—the standard dose of spirits in Jerry Thomas’s book—has been treated as one of them, but it was in fact a standard measure, representing two ounces (although there is the occasional puzzling reference to a “small wineglass” and a “large wineglass”; these will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis). The teaspoon, on the other hand, is variously quoted as ¼ ounce and 1/6 ounce (the modern teaspoon). Since the things measured in teaspoons are usually sweet, using the modern measure may lead to some drinks being more austere than they need be. In other words, if interpreting the recipes yourself use your judgment.

If there are two possible teaspoons to choose from, that’s nothing compared to the dash. Then, as now, no measure is more variable. If, in 1867, Charles B. Campbell could note that “four or five dashes of syrup” equaled 1 teaspoon of sugar, to apply this prescription to the drinks of his contemporaries would yield many a thin Cocktail and tooth-strippingly sour Punch. On the other hand, the “half-teaspoon” given as a dash in the 1871
Gentleman’s Table Guide
, an English work written with the cooperation of an American professor (“whose unsurpassed manipulation was the pride successively of the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan and Fifth Avenue Hotels”), if applied to the same formulae might render them sticky. So whenever a recipe is sweetened by dashes, I’ve tried to suggest a more measurable quantity, but be aware that there is more than a dash of arbitrariness in my suggestions. The only exception is when it comes to bitters. There, a dash is whatever squirts out of the top of the bottle.

1 Quart (Imperial) = 40 ounces
1 Quart (Wine) = 32 ounces
1 Bottle = circa 24 ounces; French champagne was imported in
liter and half-liter bottles, which were called “quarts” and
“pints”
1 Pint (Imperial) = 20 ounces
1 Pint (Wine) = 16 ounces
½ Pint (Imperial) = 10 ounces
½ Pint (Wine) = 8 ounces
1 Gill (Imperial) = 5 ounces
1 Wineglass = 2 ounces
1 Jigger = 1 Wineglass; later, also 1½ ounces or, in the bars
around Wall Street, 1¼ ounces
1 Pony = ½ Wineglass or Jigger, or 1 ounce
1 tablespoon = ½ ounce
1 teaspoon= 1/3 or ½ tablespoon (see above)
1 dash = 1 dash (see above)

The next five chapters are full of old recipes, which I’ve presented as close to verbatim as possible. Jerry Thomas and his peers have left little or nothing to posterity beyond these formulae, making the ways that they are phrased and organized the only traces we have left of their individuality; in effect, their fingerprints. Accordingly, all I’ve done with them is expand an abbreviation here and there, and occasionally consolidate several almost-identical recipes into one (e.g., the Gin Fix, the Brandy Fix, and the Whiskey Fix). Where this has caused me to alter anything, I’ve indicated that with brackets. Where it’s caused me to omit anything, I’ve deployed a line of dots. Where the original recipe uses an obsolete or imprecise unit of measurement or calls for a quantity of something that, according to my experience and testing (usually checked against other contemporary recipes), needs adjustment, I’ve taken the liberty of adding my own suggested quantity, in brackets. Note that this won’t always jibe with the table of measurements in Chapter 2, but you’re of course always free to make it the way the original recipe says.

There are passages in the chapters that follow, I should also note, where the grain of the historical detail gets rather fine. Many of these drinks are entangled in tenacious (and widely publicized) webs of myth, falsehood, and incomplete information, and I can think of no other way to extricate them than to lay out the facts in all their minute, even trivial detail. I’ve done my best to keep this within reasonable bounds—you should see what I left out—but where I’ve failed, I ask your indulgence. At least the anecdotes and citations that convey the detail are for the most part newly excavated from the archives and thus, I hope, will have the force of novelty.

For nearly two hundred years, from the 1670s to the 1850s, the Kingdom of Mixed Drinks was ruled by the Bowl of Punch, a large-bore mixture of spirits, citrus, sugar, water, and spice that bears the same relation to the anemic concoctions that pass under its name today that gladiatorial combat does to a sorority pillow fight. This isn’t the place to go into its origins or its early history; those deserve a book of their own, and God willing they’ll get one. Suffice it to say that it appears to be a version of the English drink detailed by George Gascoine in 1576 in his
Delicate Diet for Daintie Mouthde Droonkardes
, consisting of wine with “Sugar, Limons and sundry sortes of Spices . . . drowned therein,” made by English travelers in India with local ingredients—various strong spirits and lots more citrus—and spread by sailors to the mother country, her colonies and neighbors, and eventually the world.

At its peak, the ritual of the Punch bowl was a secular communion, welding a group of good fellows together into a temporary sodality whose values superseded all others—or, in plain English, a group of men gathered around a bowl of Punch could be pretty much counted on to see it to the end, come what may. This was all in good fun, but it required its participants to have a large block of uncommitted time on their hands. As the eighteenth century wore into the nineteenth, this was less and less likely to be the case. Industrialization, improved communications, and the rise of the bourgeoisie all made claims on the individual that militated against partaking of the Flowing Bowl. Not that the Victorians were exactly sober, by our standards, but neither could they be as wet as their forefathers. 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 occupied 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.” This was in fact the case. As Robert Chambers put it in 1864, “Advanced ideas on the question of temperance have doubtless . . . had their influence in rendering obsolete, in a great measure, this beverage.”

The same fate befell the bowl of Punch in America, only two generations sooner. It’s not that Americans suddenly stopped liking Punch. But they were busy, or at least thought it a virtue to seem that way. To sit around at a tavern ladling libations out of a capacious bowl was as much as to confess that you didn’t have anywhere to be for the next few hours, and America was a go-ahead country, as everyone was always saying. (Americans were in no way averse to daytime drinking, I hasten to add; but it had to be quick.) From a workhorse of daily drinking, the bowl of Punch got promoted into a job that was largely ceremonial. It became a thing to be trotted out at club banquets and on holidays.

Its size and potency aren’t the only things that sidelined the bowl of Punch. Improvements in distilling and, above all, aging of liquors meant that they required less intervention to make them palatable. The maturation of the global economy made for greater choice of potables and a more fragmented culture of drink. To some degree, central heating dimmed the charms of hot Punch. Ideas of democracy and individualism extended to men’s behavior in the barroom, where they were less likely to all settle for the same thing or let someone else choose what they were to drink. In short, like all long-running social institutions the Bowl of Punch was subject to a plethora of subtle and incremental strains. By the time Jerry Thomas set pen to paper, it was already old-fashioned, and though his book contained recipes for fifty-nine Punch-bowl drinks, it’s safe to say that most of them were foisted on him by his publishers and were essentially obsolete. The 1887 edition of his book finally acknowledged this by bumping the section on Punch from the front of the book to the back and replacing it with the one on Cocktails. (In the bartending guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the section devoted to bowls of Punch is truly vestigial, generally offering something like a dozen formulae and no more.) I have followed this tradition and reserved all but three recipes for Punch by the Bowl for their own book; those three, native American concoctions of great potency and charm, will be found after the section on Punches by the Glass.

Of course we didn’t stop drinking Punch; it was too delectable and cooling a drink for that. We just figured out a way of having it quick and on the spot—as a people, we hate to hear the word
no
, and like nothing better than having it both ways. And we’re willing to pay for it. Where there’s someone willing to pay, there’s usually someone willing to take that money. When Captain Fitzgerald saw Willard at the City Hotel, you’ll recall, he was “preparing and issuing forth punch and spirits to strange-looking men.” This suggests a much higher level of activity than the landlord’s leisurely mixing of a bowl of Punch; it’s likely that Willard was making them to order, one glass at a time. That’s certainly how he was doing them later, and that’s also how, before long, everybody else was taking them. The American plan has always been “I want mine now,” and why shouldn’t that apply to Punch as well? In fact, Willard wasn’t even the first: According to the memoirs of the rowdy rambler Big Bill Otter, by 1806 plenty of New York bars were selling Punch by the glass, both large and small. In this chapter, we’ll tackle the Greater Punches, as it were, the ones generally made long and strong.

By Jerry Thomas’s day, there were a great many formulae for one-shot Punches in circulation (sadly, though, the formula for Willard’s famous Extra Extra Peach Brandy Punch appears to have died with its creator). I present here a generous selection of the most important and, of course, tastiest.