Packing a Punch

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At family birthday parties one of my cousins used to make the punch.

It was non-alcoholic so we could all drink it.

He spent time mixing all the different elements and presented it in a beautiful way.

There was a punch bowl and everything.

I remember all the sliced fruit that gave it a unique aesthetic too.

We knew it was usually a drink that would contain alcohol so we kids used to pretend we were adults having alcohol.

Rather like when you pretended to have a cigarette but you were actually eating those cigarette sweets.

‘Punch’ we knew, should pack a punch when you drink it.

But I didn’t know at the time that the word (to mean the drink) had its origins from India.

The word ‘punch’, referring to the drink, has its roots in the Sanskrit word ‘panch’ meaning ‘five’.

We say ‘panch’ to mean ‘five’ in Gujarati as well as in Hindi too.

It’s part of my vocabulary now, but it also traces itself back to the origins of this cocktail.

The origins of the word (for the drink) indicate that it had five elements in its recipe - strong, weak, sour, sweet and spice.

Apparently, sailors from the British East India Company first encountered the drink in the 17th Century.

Back then, the sailors were given a ration of ten pints but the beer used to get spoiled because of the tropical heat.

So, to quench their thirst, they turned to local ingredients including arrack, (a type of rum usually made from sugarcane, coconut sap, red rice or fruits) and local fruits and spices like nutmeg and mace to make their drinks.

The first written reference of punch was in a letter from Robert Addams, an officer for the British East India Company, who in September 1632 greeted his colleague stating:

‘I hope you will keep good house together and drincke punch by no allowance’.*

It is said that the first written recipe for punch dates back to 1638, by a German adventurer called Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo who ran a factory in the city of Surat (Gujarat, India) and wrote that his workers drank ‘a kind of drink made of brandy, rosewater, lemon juice and sugar’.

This cocktail gained traction in London’s coffee houses when it was brought here, and it was fashionable amongst the aristocracy to own a punch bowl.

But ultimately, at its root, ‘punch’ is another immigrant word brought back by European sailors from India when they returned from their voyages.

And it made its way to our family parties in a non-alcoholic form.

It’s an observation (again) that we could have kept the word as ‘panch’ as it is not difficult to say.

However, as I said, the drink should, in theory, pack a punch when you drink it.

So perhaps the change in spelling and sound was apt for when it reached our shores.

*noted in Punch by David Wondrich (Bold Fork Books, 2010)