For centuries, bowls of punch have marked special occasions, from feats of military daring to, much later, the passage of children into adulthood—your high school prom, for example. But those super-sweet candy-colored concoctions ladled out in school gymnasiums bear about as much resemblance to old-fashioned punch as a “fruit cocktail” does to a dry martini.
Punch’s heyday was 18th-century England, where punch was a celebration of the breadth of the Empire, combining tea and spices from Asia with the spirits and wines of Europe and the New World. The British probably learned the art of punch in India, where the Hindi word panch means five, corresponding to the traditional five ingredients of the most basic punch: strong (spirits like brandy and rum), weak (water or tea), sour (citrus), sweet (sugar), and spice (which could be just about anything else added to the mix, from nutmeg and coriander to ambergris, a musky, waxy substance harvested from sperm whales).
When the custom was imported by the American colonists, punch became the centerpiece of the tavern table, where people gathered to talk taxes and treason in the days before the Revolution. In time, punch would fall out of fashion, as the great-grandchildren of the founding fathers just didn’t have the time to drink to the bottom of the bowl. They preferred the short, quick, made-to-order cocktails that took American barrooms by storm in the late 1800s. And so punch bowls were packed away on high, dusty shelves, only to be brought down for special occasions, like weddings, holidays, or high-school dances.
