Punch before the cocktail

Before the coupe, before the shaker, before anyone in Hudson, New York thought to define the word cocktail, there was a bowl. It sat in the middle of a table and belonged to everyone around it. Punch is the oldest ancestor of nearly every drink we pour, and its story begins on a ship a very long way from home.

A letter from India

The first time the word appears in writing is in a letter. On 28 September 1632, Robert Addams, an employee of the English East India Company stationed on the coast of India, wrote to a colleague urging him to keep a good house and to drink punch without stint. He did not explain what it was. He did not need to. By then the English traders on that coast already knew.

Six years later a German traveler named Johan Albert de Mandelslo, managing a trading post at Surat, described the drink in enough detail to count as a recipe: a spirit, rose water, the juice of citrons and sugar. It is a four-part drink, which matters for a reason we will come to. Through the rest of the century the references multiply. A planter in Barbados describes a punch of water and sugar in the 1650s. By the 1660s, according to David Wondrich's entry in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, punch was a staple across the Caribbean and North America and had reached Britain and the European mainland.

What sailors needed

The simplest explanation for punch is thirst. A voyage to India took months, and the beer and cider a ship carried spoiled in the tropics. Distilled spirit did not. It kept, it took up less room, and in the ports of Asia it was cheap: Batavia arrack in what is now Indonesia, coconut arrack in India. Raw spirit is hard to drink in quantity, so sailors did what sailors had long done with any harsh drink. They diluted it, sweetened it and soured it.

Citrus was already aboard for another reason. John Woodall's manual for ship's surgeons, printed in 1617, recommended lemon juice with sugar and aqua vitae against scurvy, a pairing that is punch in everything but name. The Bar-Vademecum survey of period texts makes the case plainly: the ingredients of punch were already being combined on English ships before the word existed. Whether the English invented the drink or adapted something they found in India cannot be settled from the surviving record, and the honest historians say so.

The five-ingredient idea

Ask most bartenders what punch is and they will give you a formula: one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak, with spice to finish. Sour is citrus, sweet is sugar, strong is spirit, weak is water or tea, and the spice is usually nutmeg. That rhyme is a fine way to teach balance, and it still works for a Daiquiri or a Whiskey Sour today.

The claim that the word punch comes from a Hindi word for five, because the drink has five ingredients, is weaker. It comes from John Fryer, an English physician who traveled in India and Persia from the mid-1670s and published his account in 1698. His gloss is a traveler's guess, and no Indian source has ever been found that uses the word for the drink. Mandelslo's 1638 punch had four ingredients. Later punches had six or more. In 1905 Charles Bridges Mount, writing in Notes and Queries, rejected Fryer and asked whether the name might come from the puncheon, the cask sailors drew their rum from, while admitting he had no evidence for it. Wondrich, who wrote the standing book on the subject, finds nothing in Indian literature to corroborate any of it, and in the Oxford Companion offers a third candidate: a plain English word for something squat and round, like the bowl the drink was served in. The only certain thing is that Englishmen in India made the drink with what they found there.

Bowls in London and the colonies

Punch came home with the ships. Difford's Guide describes investors going down to the London docks to drink it aboard returning East Indiamen, and after the Restoration it became the fashionable drink of the city's coffee houses, first made with arrack and then, as Caribbean sugar estates grew, with rum. Rum changed everything. It was closer, cheaper and already English in a way arrack never was. The Royal Navy swapped its beer allowance for rum, and the bowl followed the fleet to every station it held.

In the American colonies punch was the drink of public business and private celebration alike. Clubs kept their own recipes. Taverns kept bowls of a size that would alarm a modern health department. It was served cold in summer and hot in winter, and the period from the 1670s to the 1840s, in Wondrich's framing, was its great age. The bowl was the point. A punch is made once, for many, and the sharing was as much the pleasure as the drink.

Why the bowl gave way

By the middle of the nineteenth century the bowl was losing ground. Punch takes time to make and time to drink, and the cities were speeding up. Victorian drinkers wanted something shorter, poured for one, finished in a few minutes. Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide still gives punches, but they already read like heritage. Charles Dickens wrote a wistful piece about the bowl's decline. What replaced it was the single-serve drink that had grown up alongside punch: a measure of spirit with sugar, water and a dash of bitters. That bitters bottle, descended from Richard Stoughton's elixir of the 1690s, is the hinge between the age of punch and the age of the cocktail.

Punch did not vanish. It became a special-occasion drink, then a slapdash one, and then, in the 2010s, a revived one, when bartenders in London and New York put the bowl back on the bar. The shared bowl turns out to be an idea that keeps coming back.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1632 letter, the 1638 description, the spread of punch across the English trading world by the 1660s, and its decline in the mid 1800s are all documented in period sources. Folklore: the tidy story that punch means five in Hindi. It is repeated everywhere, it rests on one traveler's gloss from the 1670s, and no historian who has looked at the evidence will stand behind it. The five-part structure is useful; the etymology is a guess.

Sources

• Punch and punches: history. Difford's Guide, Simon Difford, undated. http://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1129/punch-and-punches/history
• Punch. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-393
• Punch, Toddy, Grog and Co., part 2. Bar-Vademecum, Armin Zimmermann, 2021. https://bar-vademecum.eu/?p=2285
• Stoughton's Bitters. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-1415