P+P recipe IX: 17th Century West Indian Rum Punch
I’ve been wanting to post a rum punch recipe for awhile and the initial choice was Roman punch, a Gilded Age refreshment that was all the rage in grand tour circles. Maybe it’s the combination of summer heat + required Champagne, rum, brandy, and orange curaçao topped with egg whites but a simpler summer drink with an equally cool history seemed in order.
I’m guessing cocktails containing tea are hit-and-miss for some and I can’t say I’m a huge fan myself; however, this one is really nice. And hey, the recipe’s pretty easy too per ye olde quatrain:
“One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.”
My job here is done, enjoy!
— kidding, the following recipe dates back to the 17th century and is as baseline as you can get. Which is another way of saying, here’s the blueprint but by all means make it yours.
INGREDIENTS:
2 cups fresh-squeezed lime juice
2 cups simple syrup*
4 cups full-bodied rum
6 cups brewed and cooled black tea
- Simple syrup: Combine one part sugar with one part water, heat slowly while stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Keep chilled before serving.
DIRECTIONS:
Mix ingredients in a punch bowl, add a block of ice or chill in the fridge. Serve over ice and garnish with a lime wedge.
NOTES:
If you’re not really feeling the whole punchbowl thing but still want to give rum punch a try, I *think* I figured out how you can make this a single-serve cocktail. Basically I added my simple syrup directly to my tea and let it all chill in the fridge in one pot, ladled some over a glass with ice, and added one shot of rum + half a lime’s worth of juice.
Ah, punch. Something about it sounds so antiquated and Anne of Green Gablesy but I swear I saw a crappy teen movie the other week where they spiked the punch bowl at a party so I guess the nostalgia’s preemptive?
Punch has pretty much been around for as long as we have, depending on your definition. Blending drinks for pleasurable as well as medicinal consumption is a practice that can be traced the world over and since time immemorial. The Ancient Romans had a non-alcoholic drink called posca, consisting of vinegar, water, and herbs, that was mostly drunk by soldiers, the lower classes, and slaves. Medieval peeps were all about stuffing half a hedgerow into a goblet of wine as par for the course. Diluting unclean drinking water with alcohol — any alcohol — was de rigueur in bigger towns and cities, and classics like gin & tonic got their start as nifty incentives for taking your quinine.
Punch in the manner we consume it now was intended for mostly three purposes: to stretch one’s booze supply, disguise the fact that your booze was subpar, or flex. (There are existing accounts of the fuck-you-rich commissioning Vegas-worthy punchbowls the size of a child’s swimming pool.) By the 1970s, the glowing neon punchbowl orb was a high-proof way to illuminate one’s key swap party.
The first written reference to punch can be found in a letter sent by one Robert Addams, dated September 28, 1632, from his post with the British East India Company. Six years later the first recorded recipe would be attributed to Johan Albert de Mandelslo, a German factory manager in Surat, India, who wrote that the workers consumed “a drink consisting of aqua vitae, rose-water, juice of citrons and sugar.”
Rum punch originated from the Caribbean, with Jamaican rum the standard-setter in Western societies. That’s a whole separate history, and it’s at this junction that I’d like to recommend a great piece on the colonial co-opting of rum and what steps the industry can and has been taking to make amends.
Cheers, Plaguers!
