By Tomas Brown
Recipes for milk punch are intriguingly elusive; in one early nineteenth century receipt book they are found nestled among the ‘German method of Blackening Leather’, ‘Dr Fullers Vapour for a Quincy’ and ‘Fine Red Ink’.[1] They present themselves to us pervaded by logistic and cultural incongruities. Are they recreational or medicinal? Hot or cold? Deliciously creamy or a disgusting, split mess?
Punch appears in several guises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making its way between radically different social groups. Ephriam Chamber’s 1728 Cyclopedia presents them as a ‘frequent in England, and particularly around the Maritime Parts thereof’.[2] Nicholas Robinson’s 1725 A new theory of Physic and Disease notes the dual propensity of milk punches in ‘whetting a pall’d Appetite’ and bringing on ‘involuntary issue of the Urine’.[3] Whole collections of recipes unique to academic circles appear, some recipes advising how they were drunk ‘at the university’.[4] Most pertinently for an advent post, punch is a final convivial symbol of Scrooge’s festive transformation in A Christmas Carol:
A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob![5]
Recipes like milk punch call out for us to try. Following the 1714 method from A collection of above three hundred receipts in cookery, physick and surgery, I was struck first by the quantity. The colossal (and thereby convivial) volumes of punch bowls – such as C.1570-1928 which can be seen in the Fitzwilliam – came into keener economic perspective. The olfactory and gustatory meanings of the punch became clearer as the milk curdled in the lemon, leaving a light and transparent whey; straining was unpleasant and highlighted the radical separation between the sensory worlds of kitchen labour and dining. The transformed liquid – although necessarily inauthentic – was smooth, citrusy, and not at all cheesy; a world away from what I expected, and a reminder of the tangential rewards of experimental practice.
References:
[1] The Family Receipt-book; or, Universal Repository of useful knowledge and experience in all the various branches of domestic oeconomy (Oxford Street, London: Oddy and Co,1808), http://tinyurl.com/ynhtxrxy, p11.
[2] Ephraim Chambers, “Punch” in Cyclopedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Vol.II (London: [no publisher], 1728), http://tinyurl.com/5xez7nrf, p910.
[3] Nicholas Robinson, A new theory of physick and diseases, founded on the principals of the Newtonian philosophy (London: [no publisher], 1725), http://tinyurl.com/uh283csf, p216
[4] Richard Cook, Oxford night caps, a collection of receipts for making various beverages (Oxford: [no publisher] 1827), http://tinyurl.com/ymwp386b, and Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery in all its branches (London; Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), http://tinyurl.com/ymwp386b, p550.
[5] Emphasis my own. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (Strand, London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46/pg46-images.html.
Doing History in Public 