Rum punch

“ For the common Use of making Punch, it would likewise serve much better in the State of Alcohol; as the Taste would be cleaner, and the Strength might always be regulated to a much greater Degree of Exactness than in the ordinary Way.
If the Business of rectifying Rum was more nicely managed, it seems a very practicable Scheme to throw out so much of the Oil, as to reduce it to the fine light State of a clear Spirit, but lightly impregnated with the Oil; in this State it would nearly resemble Arrac, as is easily proved by mixing a very small Quantity of it with a tasteless Spirit ”

“ Half a pint of rum, half a pint of brandy, quarter of a pound of sugar, one large lemon, half a teaspoonful of nutmeg, one pint of boiling water.
Rub the sugar over the lemon until it has absorbed all the yellow part of the skin, then put the sugar into a punch bowl; add the lemon juice (free from pips) and mix these two ingredients, well together. Pour over them the boiling water, stir well together, add the rum, brandy and nutmeg; mix thoroughly and the punch will be ready to serve. It is very important in making good punch that all the ingredients are thoroughly incorporated ”

“ A man can never make good Punch unless he is satisfied, nay positive, that no man breathing can make better. I can and do make good Punch, because I do nothing else; and this is my way of doing it. I retire to a solitary corner, with my ingredients ready sorted; they are as follows; and I mix them in the order they are here written. Sugar, twelve tolerable lumps; hot water, one pint; lemons, two, the juice and peel; old Jamaica rum, two gills; brandy, one gill ”

“ You, Sir—imbibed whiskey! No harm in good whiskey—excellent thing, good whiskey! But injuriverius—should say, injurious—if has too much flavour of malt! Your whiskey too much flavour of malt! You took brandy—bad brandy—too much taste of grapes! You took rum—bad rum—too much mo—mo—molasses! Now I took all three—whiskey, brandy, rum, but pure—no by-products. No, not at all. Result! See! Sober as judge!"
And, succumbing to a sudden desire for slumber, the Professor, at this point of his discourse, joined his friends under the table!
CYCLING NOTES.
He. "DO YOU BELONG TO THE PSYCHICAL SOCIETY?" ”

“ Pure, old rum, is incomparably more wholesome than brandy; Dr. Short, therefore, prefers it to any other spirit, both as a cordial, and for making punch. It softens and dilates the alimentary canal, while it promotes a more regular perspiration, as well as the discharge of urine. ”

“ And into the crock I puts two gallons of rum––fine rum it was––for a bottom. Every good punch has to have a bottom. 218 It’s like the big blocks they put under a house by way of a foundation, or the ballast down near the keel of a vessel––there’d be no stiffening without it, and the first good breeze she’d capsize, and then where’d you be? ”

“ The punch never failed. If rum was to be had for money, she got it from somewhere. I have known her, sir, get into her sledge and drive a day's [Pg 303] journey into town to get rum for me. A diamond-hearted woman, I say! And then her love, too! Despite this ruby nose of mine, she loves me. She says it suits me very well. Nay, she is not even hurt at remaining simply the wife of a senior lieutenant. But for her I should have sent a bullet through my head long ago. ”

“ Let them grow up with an utter aversion to strong drink. Take care how you administer it even as medicine. If you find that they have a natural love for it, as some have, put in a glass of it some horrid stuff and make it utterly nauseous. Teach them as faithfully as you do the catechism, that rum is a fiend. Take them to the alms-house and show them the wreck and ruin it works. Walk with them into the homes that have been scourged by it. If a drunkard hath fallen into a ditch, take them right up where they can see his face, bruised, savage and swollen, and say, "Look, my son: Rum did that!" ”

“ Few men take their rum in the same fashion or with the same expression. The new draft look at it coyly, carry the cup gingerly to their lips, smell it, make a desperate resolution, gulp it down, and cough for five minutes afterwards. The old hands—the men of rubicund countenance and noses of a doubtful hue—grasp the cup, look to see if the issue is a full one, raise it swiftly, and drain it without a moment’s hesitation, smacking their lips. You can see the man who was up for being drunk the last pay-day coming from afar for his rum. ”

“ To them, that little tot of rum is not simply alcohol. It is a God-send. Promise it to them before they set out, and those men will work like Trojans. Deny it to them, and more than half will parade sick in the morning.
It is no use, if the rum ration is short, to water it down. The men know it is watered, and their remarks are “frequent and painful, and free!” Woe betide the officer who, through innocence or intentionally, looks too freely on the rum when it is brown! His reputation is gone for ever. ”

“ I never saw such a pack of blood-thirsty devils in my life."
"So much for rum," said I.
"Yes, sir; so much for rum," was the emphatic response. "It was the rum, and nothing else. Why, some of the very men who acted the most like tigers and devils, are as harmless persons as you will find in Cedarville when sober. Yes, sir; it was the rum, and nothing else. Rum gave me this broken head and black eye."
"So you had been drinking also?"
"Oh, yes. There's no use in denying that."
"Liquor does you harm."
"Nobody knows that better than I do."
"Why do you drink, then?" ”

“ Stimulating, enervating, poisonous, horrible—all the more so perhaps because it is not intoxicating exactly—God has put a barrier against its use by making it distasteful; but, strange to say, all those things men run after: rum, tobacco, opium, absinthe, are always distasteful at first, if not for a long time afterward.
But the French do not drink rum, gin, whiskey or water to any great extent. With the exception of absinthe and considerable brandy, their drinking occupies a middle ground. They revel in a multitude of subtile, delightful mixtures—liqueurs, crêmes and sirops. ”

“ It is needless to enter into any detail of the history of these fluids. Brandy kills soonest; it takes most rapidly to the head, and, more readily than the others, tinges the face to a crimson or livid hue. Rum is probably the next in point of fatality; and, after that, whisky and gin. ”

“ The barrels were coming in fast, so fast that it was impossible for the representatives of law and order to keep on any sort of terms with them. The people, shouting with laughter, stove in the casks, and drank rum at 34° above proof, out of their hands, out of their hats, out of their boots. Women came fluttering over the hillsides through the twilight, carrying jugs, milk-pails, anything that would hold the liquor; I saw one of them, roaring with laughter, tilt a filthy zinc bucket to an old man's lips. ”

“ The Dutch in New York called the liquor brandy-wine, and soon in that colony wherever strong waters were named in tavern lists, the liquor was neither aqua vitæ nor gin nor brandy, but New England rum.
[Pg 102] It soon was cheap enough. Rev. Increase Mather, the Puritan parson, wrote, in 1686: “It is an unhappy thing that in later years a Kind of Drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor and wicked, too, can for a penny make themselves drunk.” ”

“ Why do you laugh in that way?”
“Excuse me—but you have such an odd way of borrowing that I cannot help it. This bottle, it seems, was brought over for your own convenience, not for mine. I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have no whiskey.”
“I guess spirits will do as well; I know there is some in that keg, for I smells it.”
“It contains rum for the workmen.”
“Better still. I calculate when you've been here a few months, you'll be too knowing to give rum to your helps. But old country folks are all fools, and that's the reason they get so easily sucked in, and be so soon wound-up. ”

“ Oh, rum! cursed rum! I hate it with intensest hatred: for it dims the brightest intellects; it sullies and makes impure the most spotless and the best; it spares neither frail and unprotected womanhood, innocent childhood, nor hoary age; it enters like a serpent the Eden called home and seduces its inmates to their fall, thus turning this paradise of love into a hell of fiercest passions and intensest hate; it entails upon the drunkard's children in their very existence a patrimony of depraved appetites and unholy passions ”

“ This was the allowance of solid food served out once a-day to each, from that time to the end; with the addition of a coffee-berry, or sometimes half a one, when the weather was very fair, for breakfast. We had nothing else whatever, but half a pint of water each per day, and sometimes, when we were coldest and weakest, a teaspoonful of rum each, served out as a dram. I know how learnedly it can be shown that rum is poison, but I also know that in this case, as in all similar cases I have ever read of—which are numerous—no words can express the comfort and support derived from it. ”

“ If that were a fitting end for great knaves, the meaner ruffians must be content with the pump-handle and the bucket.
It is hard if our hearts may not go out to those gloomy vessels, with their cargoes of gold and courage and rum, that sail, it seems, the mental seas of youth no more. Were they really bad for us, those sanguinary tussles, those star-lit nights of dissipation? A pinafore would wipe away a deal of blood, and the rum, though we might drink it boiling like Quilp, in no wise lessened our interest in home-made cake. ”

“ Not that they prefer rum. I never knew a sailor, who had been a month away from the grog shops, who would not prefer a pot of hot coffee or chocolate, in a cold night, to all the rum afloat. They all say that rum only warms them for a time; yet, if they can get nothing better, they will miss what they have lost. The momentary warmth and glow from drinking it; the break and change which it makes in a long, dreary watch by the mere calling all hands aft and serving of it out ”

“ They contain all the necessaries of fermentation, and when mixed with molasses and “dunder,” which is the fermented wash left from distillation, are distilled into rum.
The odour of rum is very volatile; so much so, that it should be casked immediately after distillation. The raw spirit is extremely injurious; but it improves so much by age that, at a sale in Carlisle in 1865, rum, known to be 140 years old, sold at three guineas a bottle. Like all alcohol, rum, when distilled, is white, the colour being given to it, as it used to be in brown brandy, by caramel (burnt sugar) . ”

“ If he became intoxicated on beer, champagne, or whisky, he would only be envied by the majority of his men, but should he drink too much rum—that is an unpardonable offence!
As a rule, one of the hardest things in the world to do is to awaken men once they have gone to sleep at night. For no matter what [126] purpose, it will take a company a good half-hour to pull itself together and stand to. But murmur softly to the orderly Sergeant that there will be a rum issue in ten minutes, and though it be 1 A.M. or the darkest hour before dawn, when the roll is called hardly a man will be absent! ”

“ When, next day, our executives of prohibition came into Dodge, they were amazed, while scarcely gratified, to find every rum shop locked up fast and tight. The Dance Hall, the Alhambra, the Long Branch and the Alamo, acting on the hint of Mr. Masterson, had closed their doors, and not a drink of whiskey, not even for rattlesnake-bite, could have been bought from one end of the street to the other. Not that this paucity of rum-selling seemed to bear heavily upon the community. There were never so many gentlemen of Dodge whom one might describe as wholly and successfully drunk. ”

“ The ripe taste which rum or brandy that has been long kept in oaken casks obtains, is imparted to new brandy and rum, by means of a spirituous tincture of raisin-stones and oak saw-dust. And the water distilled from cherry-laurel-leaves is frequently mixed with brandy and other spirituous liquors to impart to them the flavour of the cordial called Noyeau. Sugar of lead not unfrequently forms part of the flavouring ingredients of the retailers’ rums.
But the perfection of adulteration is in gin,—cheap gin—“the real comfort,”—patronized by the poor for its supposed genuineness! ”

“ If one man begins, the rest take it up. The noise thus made appears deafening. To obviate this, petrol tins of water and tea in hot food-containers have been dumped about the assembly positions, so that men may from time to time moisten their mouths and throats. Further, a tot of rum is served to all. Rum played a great part in the war. It produces a marvellous and immediate effect, dispelling depression, creating warmth, and stimulating the morale. Even the staunchest teetotallers will drink rum with avidity in the assembly trenches. ”

“ Let him pay heavily for his luxuries. He wants you much; I only hope we may find he wants the rum more.”
“There are plenty of mermaids, but only one bottle of rum that we know of. I swam all through the sunken ship and drove the fishes from the dead men, and a drowned [183] woman with a baby in her arms. There is no rum left there. Air-breathers must love the liquid also, for they had all rushed to drink before their drowning. ”