Imbibe! (14 page)

Read Imbibe! Online

Authors: David Wondrich

 
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Use superfine sugar, or substitute gum syrup. How much is needed will depend on the dryness of the champagne and the sweetness of the maraschino liqueur, which might be sufficient all by itself. If it’s not, begin with 2 ounces and adjust upward by taste.
 
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
Steep the lemon slices in the combined rum and maraschino for at least 4 hours before assembly. For improvising a block of ice, see Philadelphia Fish-House Punch (page 89).
CHATHAM ARTILLERY PUNCH
Finally, a Punch not from Jerry Thomas. The Chatham Artillery of Savannah was a Social-Register militia of considerable antiquity (it was formed in 1786) that spent far more time parading and partying than it did loading cannons and shooting them, at least until those hotheads up the coast in Charleston fired on Fort Sumter. After seeing considerable action in its neck of the woods, part of the battery was captured in 1864 and the rest surrendered in 1865. Eventually, it was reconstituted, going on to serve in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and on, until the present, As I write this, it—or rather its successor, the 118th Battalion of the Georgia National Guard—is deployed in Iraq.
Back in the day, it was not a unit that deprived itself of the good things in life, as long as such were to be had. As Charles Jones recalled in 1867, at the beginning of the Civil War “the
cuisine
of the company was perfect” and “the well fed Artillery-man, enjoying his champagne punch within the comfortable casemates, little thought of the coming day when even a glass of Confederate whisky could not be obtained.”
I don’t know precisely when the below recipe made its debut or its connection to Jones’s “champagne punch,” but by the end of the century the Chatham Artillery’s house Punch was a byword for its seductiveness and potency. One Georgia newspaper assured its readers in 1883 that “there is such a beverage made and known as artillery punch. We are living witnesses to the fact that it is no misnomer. When it attacketh a man it layeth him low and he knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth.” That was Admiral Dewey’s experience of it, anyway, when he visited Savannah in 1900, just as it was Chester Arthur’s a few years before and William Howard Taft’s a few years after. The
Baltimore American
summed up its reputation in a poem, or at least a limerick:
 
When you visit the town of Savannah
Enlist ’neath the temperance banneh,
For if you should lunch,
On artillery punch,
It will treat you in sorrowful manneh.
 
The city’s boosters conceded its strength, but claimed that the skill with which the locals concocted it mitigated the damage; that “in Savannah, it puts a man to bed like a gentleman; outside of Savannah it makes him a howling imbecile, a laughing-stock for the populace, and a victim for the police barracks.”
Although the Punch’s composition was supposedly no secret, I have been unable to find a formula for it earlier than 1897, when a member of the Georgia Pharmaceutical Society contributed sketchy and manifestly incomplete instructions for it to a trade journal. The version below, printed a decade later, is somewhat better, although it nonetheless bears clear signs of corruption. (Its source admits as much when it says that “its vigor in those days [i.e., when the Chatham Artillery was founded] was much greater than at present, experience having taught the rising generation to modify the receipt of their forefathers to conform to the weaker constitutions of their progeny.”)
 
1 GALLON CATAWBA WINE, LIGHT COLOR
 
1 QUART ST. CROIX RUM
 
4 CANS SLICED PINEAPPLES
 
2½ DOZEN LEMONS
 
3 ORANGES
 
1 BOTTLE OF MARASCHINO CHERRIES
 
2 CUPS OF STRONG GREEN TEA
 
4 BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE (AMERICAN WILL DO AS WELL AS IM-
PORTED)
 
 
Mix the juices of the lemons, pineapples and liquor of the cherries with the Catawba wine, St. Croix rum and tea, then sweeten to taste. This is known as the stock, and improves with age.
Before serving, this should be cooled in a refrigerator, or by placing a piece of ice in it.
When ready to serve, put a piece of ice in the punch bowl, then pour in the stock, leaving room for a prorate part of the Champagne.As each charge is put into the bowl, oranges and pineapples sliced into small particles, and cherries, should be added in proportion to the amount used.
The stock should be kept at least two days before serving.
SOURCE: PERCY HAMMOND AND GEORGE C. WHARTON,
POKER, SMOKE AND OTHER THINGS
, 1907
 
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
First off, the Catawba presents a challenge. If you can find some (it’s still made on a small scale), use it. Otherwise, any sweet and fruity domestic wine of a tolerable quality will do, especially if it’s pink (paging white zin . . . ). Then the pineapple: It should be fresh, not canned. For this amount, 2 whole pineapples should do, sliced into chunks. As for the maraschino cherries, these are not present in the 1897 version. Instead, a quart of whiskey (use rye) is added. Here’s that greater vigor. That same recipe also calls for sufficient strawberries to flavor and color the Punch (a quart should do, cored and cut in half). This must be right, since it gives the Punch a rich red color, and red is the traditional color of the artillery. If used, you’ll need more sugar.
 
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
Pretty much as directed, except adding the pineapple chunks and strawberries (if used) at the beginning instead of the canned and bottled juices, and omitting the pineapple particles and cherries at the end. This would benefit, as all Punches do, by preparing an oleo-saccharum at the beginning (see Philadelphia Fish-House Punch (page 89); start with ½ cup sugar). If you’re incorporating strawberries, muddle them in with the lemon peel and the sugar, add the citrus and strain before proceeding with the rest of the assembly.
CHAPTER 4
THE CHILDREN OF PUNCH: COLLINSES, FIZZES, DAISIES, SOURS, COOLERS, AND COBBLERS
The glass of Punch went forth in the new land and multiplied, begetting a whole host of other drinks. Even the Cobbler, an unpunchy drink if ever there was one, can be seen as one of its offshoots, combining as it does wine, sugar, ice, and a couple of slices of citrus shaken in.
I. THE LESSER PUNCHES: FIXES AND SOURS (AND THE KNICKERBOCKER)
One of the many questions that could have easily been answered by knowledgeable and careful inquiry at the time and now is probably past recovery is, Wherefore the rise of the “short drink” in mid-Victorian America? Was it due to the increasing popularity of the Cocktail? Or was it merely a symptom, an acknowledgment of the accelerating pace of urban life? Whatever the reason, the decade or two before the Civil War saw American barkeepers making, and American tipplers tippling, pocket versions of those two mainstays of bar-drinking, the Mint Julep and the glass of Punch, versions made and served not in the large bar-glass, but the small one.
Nineteenth-century Americans dearly loved to make up names for things (viz, the map of North America), and these drinks rapidly took on identities, and as it were, lives of their own. You’ll find the baby Julep listed herein as the Smash, which is the only name it was ever known by. The lesser Punches, however, were more numerous in their generation and their classification is not easy.
The two earliest classes of lesser Punch—the Fix and the Sour—entered the historical record at the same time, in a Toronto saloon’s drink list that is dated, by hand, to 1856 (see under Evolved Cocktails for more on this extraordinary document), which means there is no surefire way of determining which one came first. But when comparing ancient manuscripts, one of the principles scholars rely on is the idea that the
lectio dificilior
, the “more difficult reading,” is the one most likely to be older, since the monks who copied out the manuscripts tended to simplify what they didn’t understand. According to this principle, the Fix should have seniority over the Sour, since it is the more involved drink to make. The fact that its distinguishing feature is the same ornamental garnish that graced Willard-era Punches works to support this conclusion.
 
 
BRANDY, GIN, SANTA CRUZ, OR WHISKEY FIX
 
Dificilior
or not, the Fix, or “Fix-Up” (which gives us a clue as to its etymology) isn’t exactly complicated—it’s merely a short Punch with fancy fruit garnish. As such, it’s a surprisingly mysterious beverage: It appears in just about all the bartender’s bibles published before Prohibition and is among the few drinks listed as essential for the bartender to know in Paul Lowe’s influential
Drinks: How to Mix and Serve
from 1909—and yet devil a drinker do you find actually ordering one. (I suspect that most people, not well up on their technical mixology, would have simply described it as a “fancy Sour,” which may explain why we don’t hear of it.)
 
(USE SMALL BAR-GLASS.)
 
1 TABLE-SPOONFUL
[1 TSP]
OF SUGAR
 
[JUICE OF]
¼ OF A LEMON
 
½ A WINE-GLASS
[1 TBSP]
OF WATER
 
1 WINE-GLASS
[2 OZ]
OF
[SPIRITS]
 
Fill a tumbler two-thirds full of shaved ice. Stir with a spoon and dress the top with fruit in season.
SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862 (COMPOSITE)
 
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
The 1887 edition of Thomas’s book adds “3 dashes [say, 1 tsp] of Curaçoa,” which ain’t a bad idea. By the 1880s, recipes were calling for the sugar to be replaced by
½
ounce of pineapple syrup. This, too, works well. For garnish, pieces of pineapple and orange, lemon peel (which is rubbed around the rim of the glass before being dropped in), and berries in season are idiomatic.
As for spirits: The canonical ones are brandy (cognac, preferably), Holland gin, Santa Cruz rum and, eventually, plain old domestic whiskey. Without input from its drinkers, it’s impossible to say which was ultimately most popular.
BRANDY, GIN, SANTA CRUZ, OR WHISKEY SOUR
“When American meets American then comes the whisky sour.” Thus declared the
Atlanta Daily Constitution
in 1879, and it wasn’t wrong. From roughly the 1860s to the 1960s, the Sour, and particularly its whiskey incarnation, was one of the cardinal points of American drinking, and, along with the Highball, one of the few drinks that could come near to slugging it out with the vast and aggressive tribe of Cocktails in terms of day-in, day-out popularity. It began pulling away from its siblings among the lesser Punches early: In 1858, we find it popular enough that the
New York Times
could attach the epithet “Brandy-sour”
By 1902, when this handy cast-iron and porcelain juicer was included in a hotelware catalogue, it was obsolescent; a generation or two earlier, though, it must have been a revelation. (Author’s collection)
to the name of a certain Mr. Brisley and expect people to know what that meant. In 1863, matters had already reached the point that the local paper from across the river in the great and liberal city of Brooklyn considered “compounder of cocktails, skins and sours” an acceptable circumlocution for “barkeeper.”
Two things appear to have driven the Sour’s quick elevation to indispensability: It was simple, and it was flexible. “The . . . sour,” wrote Jerry Thomas, “is made with the same ingredients as the . . . fix, omitting all fruits except a small piece of lemon, the juice of which must be pressed in the glass.” So: spirits, sugar, water, lemon, ice. The only real question here is the ratio of sugar to lemon. But that one’s a doozy (it still is—if you want to get a mixologist riled, tell him he’s put too much sugar in his Sour). There were essentially two schools: those who took the name seriously, and those who considered it akin to a child’s protestation that she’s not tired at all, really. The former, among whom we may count the author of the
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
and whoever reworked the Professor’s book, call for the juice of half of a lemon and a teaspoon or so of sugar—a tart and tasty drink. But Jerry Thomas himself, and most who followed him—Harry Johnson, George Kappeler, Bill Boothby—show what is perhaps a more realistic view of human nature and make their Sours sweet, restricting the lemon juice to a few dashes or a quarter of a lemon’s worth at most, and making sure that there’s plenty of sweet to balance it out.
One notable innovation was to cap a Whiskey Sour with a float of red wine, to give it what one Chicago bartender called “the claret ‘snap’” (in the language of the saloon, red wine was always called “claret,” no matter how distant its origins from the sunlit banks of the Gironde). This worthy, who was interviewed in 1883, claimed ownership over this bit of fanciness, adding that “men who drink our sours expect a claret at every bar, and when it is not put in they ask for it. It’s getting circulated now, and other places are adopting our flourish.” (One is entitled to be skeptical, as he claimed to have invented the Manhattan as well, but there does exist another description of a Chicago bartender assembling a Whiskey Sour that same year, and lo and behold, he tops it off with claret, too.) Whoever invented it, this “Continental Sour,” “Southern Whiskey Sour,” or—the name it finally settled on in the early 1900s—“New York Sour” was broadly popular. As our Chicago barkeep noted, “the claret makes the drink look well and it gives it a better taste.”
In the 1890s, some of the fecundity with which bartenders were generating new Cocktails and Fizzes touched the humble Sour as well, and where before there had been only the basic versions, named after the spirits that animated them, suddenly the bars are festooned with signs for Blackthorn Sours (with sloe gin, pineapple syrup, and a splash of apricot liqueur), Sours a la Creole (brandy and Jamaica rum with lime juice and “a little ice cream on top”), Dizzy Sours (rye with a dash of Benedictine and a Jamaica rum float), Jack Frost Whiskey Sours (apple “whiskey”—i.e., applejack—with an egg and cream), and the like.
But by this point the Sour was already being attracted away from its orbit around Punch and into a new one around the Cocktail. This realignment was greatly facilitated by a trend that began early: The
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
instructed that “in the manufacture of fixes and sours a small bar-glass or ordinary tumbler is employed, and a strainer placed in the glass to drink through.” This use of the strainer was popular for a time, but by the 1880s bartenders had taken control of the device back from the drinker and were serving their Sours up, in a special Sour glass—basically, a footed glass, rather deeper than a Cocktail glass (to make room for the drink’s somewhat more generous proportions, for the garnish that it had swiped from the Fix, and for the seltzer with which it was sometimes lightened). After 1905 or so, most new short drinks with citrus became Cocktails (see Cocktail Punches) and the Sour’s flirtation with fanciness ceased.
I’ve provided the formula from the
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
since it’s a little more precise than Thomas’s.
 
ONE WINE GLASS
[2 OZ]
OF
[SPIRITS]
 
HALF WINE GLASS
[1 OZ]
OF WATER
 
ONE TABLESPOONFUL OF SUGAR
 
HALF OF A LEMON
 
 
Squeeze a portion of the lemon into the tumbler, which should be a quarter full of ice, and rub the lemon on the rim of the glass. Stir with a spoon. . . . In the manufacture of fixes and sours a small bar-glass or ordinary tumbler is employed.
SOURCE:
STEWARD & BARKEEPER’S MANUAL
, 1869 (COMPOSITE)

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