Arrack & Port milk punch with tea.

David Wondrich took a straight punch from Jerry Thomas and added milk to produce an excellent viscous clarified variation. You can get a comparable flavor using tawny instead of ruby Port but will lose the pretty opalescent pink tint of the final product in the process. For more on both Wondrich and Thomas, go to the lyrical.

• 2/3 cup Batavia arrack
• 1/3 cup lemon juice
• 2/3 cup ruby port
• 1/3 cup golden syrup
• 1 cup strong black tea
• 1 cup whole milk

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1. Whisk together everything but the milk
2. Boil the milk and add it to the arrack solution.
3. Let the curdled mess stand for 2 hours.
4. Strain the punch through a jellybag or coffee filter cradled in a strainer. It will take some time to pass in batches.
5. Bottle the punch and refrigerate it.
6. Serve the punch over a very big chunk of ice.

Notes:

-Arrack is not jumping off the shelves of American liquor stores, but it is inexpensive, strong (usually about 50% ABV), distributed nationwide and a kindly shopkeeper will order you some. If authenticity is attractive to you, and it should be, arrack will be attractive as well. Originally distilled by the Dutch in their eat Indian islands from sugar, it likely was the basis for the very first punch ever created by, however, British sailors.

-The actual Wondrich recipe is deficient in several respects. He does not boil the milk, which makes it necessary to strain the punch through the curd two and sometimes even three times before it clarifies. Boiling the milk streamlines the process and also creates a clearer punch without harming its flavor in any way.

-Wondrich also specifies twice the proportion of tea, which makes an unusually weak punch. Tea itself does appear in a lot of the eighteenth century recipes for punch whether clarified with milk or not, the unbanned Four Loko of the era. You could drink punch all night, but should you do that?