The Spirits #7: Rum Punch

~ One of Sour, Two of Sweet ~ Decolonising Rum ~ We Are Not the Same ~ Nogronis ~ Pawn's Gambit ~

~ RUM PUNCH ~

Serves four. (Or: one person four times)

One lemon
50g brown sugar
200ml dark rum
200ml cold tea
Nutmeg

Remove the lemon zest with a vegetable peeler taking care to avoid the white pith. Place all of the strips in a bowl with the sugar and pound with a muddler or wooden spoon until the sugar becomes saturated in the fragrant oils from the peel. Pour over the rum gradually, continuing to stir/pound, so that all of the sugar dissolves. Add the tea, continuing to stir. Finally, slice the denuded lemon and squeeze in a little juice, tasting for balance as you go. (Be sparing with the lemon juice - i.e. no more than half a lemon.) Add lots of ice - ideally one huge cube! - decorate with fruits and serve with extra ice in each glass, grating nutmeg over the top.

Punch notes:

1) This is the simplest iteration of Rum Punch - but the version I recommend you get your head round before messing around with it. But once you have… feel free to add dashes of whatever liqueurs/syrups/juices you happen to have at hand. And if you feel like garnishing with slices of lemon, mint leaves, rose petals, and @-ing me - well, be my guest.

2) You can make a simpler version of this punch in a glass! Fortunately, someone had the foresight to publish this recipe in the Guardian a few months ago (scroll down).

3) You can also serve this hot? Warm it in a saucepan and pour over hot tea as opposed to cold.

4) …and if you’re going to serve it hot why not SET IT ON FIRE? The safest way is to warm the rum with the lemon-sherbet, extract a spoonful of rum, ignite, and then use that burnin’ spoonful to ignite the rest. Let it bubble and caramelise for about 30 seconds then use the pan lid to extinguish. Then add the tea, etc.

5) Tea? Black tea, green tea, lapsang souchong, darjeeling, chamomile, any kind of herbal tea? Actual leaf tea is best - ideally by the matchless Rare Tea Company. Please note too that the best way to make cold tea is COLD-BREWING. Let the leaves steep in cold water overnight and remove in the morning.

6) MUSIC. And welcome!

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WE can all name things we’ve missed in 2020, specific, habitual things we once did (or would have done) but are suspended, forbidden and/or punishable by £10,000 fines. Listening to music in a crowd. Introducing your new baby to his great-grandmother. Dressing up. Full-hearted bear-hug hellos and goodbyes. Paddington Station. La Mian noodle bar. Your mate Pete dropping Tarantula. Bars. Did I say bars? Bars!

But there’s a second category of missing things - unspecific things that you can’t officially miss because they didn’t get the chance to happen. The acquaintance you didn’t randomley get deep in conversation with at the British Library. The joke you didn’t get to crack. The particular feeling you didn’t have when you didn’t walk into the grocery shop on the first day of the holiday you didn’t go on. The unmooted schemes, unmapped out trips, unfrissons, unpuns, unpportunities, unpiphanies. The friends… *schmaltzy movie trailer voice* you didn’t get the chance to meet. And the parties you didn’t get to host.

I felt a special pang for the unparties of 2020 as I pounded brown sugar into lemon peels to make the oleo-saccharum for this week’s recipe. This is the “ambrosial essence”, of punch (and the first thing mentioned in the very first cocktail book). And it has become, for me, a Proustian portal into parties past, parties future, parties we didn’t get round to having this year. There are far greater losses, of course, tangible losses. But I don’t think I’d really taken in until just now how much I miss those parties. The new combinations of thoughts and feelings that naturally flow whenever you get a bunch of people in a room. I even miss the washing up.

And I do miss making punch for a crowd. I’d only just got good at it too.

Punch! Punch is at once an unspecific thing- a communal drink, a flowing bowl, a houseparty teetering just out of the host’s control - and a specific thing. Once you extract that ambrosial essense you will know what I mean. When Mary Poppins closes her eyes and imagines what she wants the medicine to taste like, guess what she choose?

A true punch has five elements: sweet, sour, alcohol, dilution and spice. Quintessentially (and in the recipe above) those roles are played by sugar, lemon (or lime), rum, tea and nutmeg. The word “punch” is often said to derive from the Hindi for “five” - though in his deep-dive on the subject, David Wondrich suggests that it is more likely to come from the 500-litre “puncheon” barrel from which it was often served. But still, punch is an Indian invention - traditionally made with coconut- or rice-based arrack, or rum. Which is also an Indian invention by the way. There are mentions of fermented distilled sugar cane juice in ancient Sanskrit texts. The 7th century ayurvedic physician Vagbhata apparently counselled that it be mixed with mango juice and drunk “together with friends”. Sound advice, no?

Punch came back to Britain with the colonial plunderers of the East India Company and (like coffee and, later, tea) became a mainstay of fashionable gatherings. Everyone had their own recipe. Charles Dickens sure did. And punch also flowed out to the British sugar plantations of the Caribbean . Rum was a logical byproduct of the sugar/slave trade; “Planter’s Punch” was a logical way of drinking rum. “One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak” was the rhyme the plantation owners taught the house slaves whom they charged with making their punches.

I’m afraid there’s no getting away from rum’s darker associations: with slavery and colonialism and later, cultural appropriation, capitalist exploitation and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. I recommend Israel Meléndez Ayala’s essay on the subject for Sourced Journeys if you want a Caribbean-centred account of the rum trade, or as he puts it, “a dehumanising and vicious cycle of profit at the expense of the very people who laboured to grow and distill sugar cane into the newly profitable spirit”. It is only now that the wider rum industry is confronting some of the more unsavoury aspects of its history and rediscovering its actual (i.e. non-white) heritage. Meanwhile, it is gaining the prestige it deserves.

There’s millions more things I could say about rum but here’s one. If I had to choose only one spirit category to drink forevermore? Rum. And Rum Punch is the best place I can think of to ignite a love affair with rum. It’s a mixture that is to (dark) rum what the Old Fashioned is to bourbon and the Martini is to gin. No two punches are the same; but then no two rums are the same. That’s all to the good.

I say I only recently got good at making punch. You really should do the whole business with the lemon peels - it makes a real difference. But my Eureka! moment came when I began adding less lemon. Look at that rhyme again: “One of sour, two of sweet”… In punch, the citrus is more there to round out the flavours rather than to make it tart or tangy. Add the lemon a squirt at a time, tasting as you go, and you’ll see what I mean. Oh and do use fresh nutmeg if you can. The first time I drank punch in the Caribbean, that’s how it came, very simply, none of your faux-tiki granishes, and that’s how I like it now. Try it. You will soon appreciate why the Dutch once traded the city of New York for nutmeg.

A party in your mouth! Which is better than no party at all.

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PLAYLIST

A pan-Caribbean playlist this week. Seemed rude not to, somehow?

CW: The only song in existence to reference the Duke of Edinburgh?!

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SWIGGED TOO MUCH

“My memory is encircled with blood. My memory has a belt of corpses!
and machine gun fire of rum barrels
brilliantly sprinkling our ignominious revolts,
amorous glances
swooning from having swigged too much ferocious freedom”

— Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natale (translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith

The rum counter-history I mentioned above referenced the great Martiniquean poet Césaire… and took me back to my French undergraduate days when we read (and little understood) his epic poem. Césaire was the subject of a great documentary on Radio 3 recently - highly recommended.

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ASK RICHARD

Renowned publisher and Negroniophile Christian Layolle wonders:

“Are there any good mocktails that don’t taste like sugar piss?

No.

Would be the answer of an unreconstruced booze-type from 2006. These days? I’m sympathetic to non-boozers and the cause of non-boozing too. And so, increasingly, is the spirits indsutry, as evidence by the astonishing number of “no/low” spirits entering the market following the success of Seedlip. These ersatz gins, faux vermouths, pseudo amari, etc, have the virtue of not being too sweet - which is where most non-alcoholic options fall down. Of special note: Lyres, which does pretty much the full cocktail cabinet. The non-bourbon bourbon is uncanny. They even do a fake Campari.

They’re expensive, though. Which is why, for my money, the best non-sweet-non-alcoholic option… is kombucha. Real Kombucha and Jarr are well-made, food-friendly and mixable too. It’s also worth looking out for Crodino, a naturally non-alcoholic sparkling Italian aperitivo which is a bit like Irn-Bru had a lovechild with Aperol.

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OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of the Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout.

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WHAT I’M READING

I just finished Christian Wolmar’s Cathedrals of Steam, a history of the great London railway stations. Review in tomorrow’s Times.

“Is it bigger than Geri leaving the Spice Girls? Don’t be ridiculous”. The great Marina Hyde on Dominic Cummings. (Guardian).

Rita Indiana’s Songs for the Apocalypse. (New Yorker)

Alicia Kennedy on rum and sustainability. (Substack).

And if you’ve been watching the Queen’s Gambit, you might enjoy this oldie from Sam Parker… on being terrible at chess but enjoying it anyway. I can relate. (Esquire)

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SHOPPING LIST

We’ll stick with dark rum next week. (NB: I’ve added RUM to the list of ingredients in the Virtual Cabinet, here). Also: Campari, pineapple juice, lime, sugar.

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