The New Yorker recently reviewed the restaurant Betony, in New York City, and praised its milk punch. The drink, as prepared at the restaurant, “tastes like magic: smooth, sweet, and spicy–depending on a changing roster of seasonings, such as bergamot tea and Thai bird chili–topped off with your choice of spirit and served over a gigantic ice cube.”
Never heard of milk tea? Neither had I. Intrigued, I checked my stash of cookbooks downloaded from Google Books for the phrase “milk punch” and came up with many hits.
The oldest recipe I have (and I’m sure there are many others out there) comes from page 187 of The London and Country Cook, from 1749, published in London. The recipe is:
To make fine milk punch.
Take two quarts of water, one quart of milk, half a pint of lemon juice, and one quart of brandy, sugar to your taste; put the milk and water together a little warm, then the sugar, then the lemon juice; stir it well together; then the brandy; stir it again, and run it through a flannel bag till it is very fine; then bottle it; it will keep a fortnight or more.
A few observations about the recipe. First, the milk will have a much higher percentage of fat than anything you can buy at the store today, including whole milk; this milk would have had the cream skimmed from it but otherwise would be quite rich. Second, the moment that lemon juice hits the milk-water mixture the milk is going to curdle like crazy. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it will result in a thick sort of drink with what is probably an interesting texture. Of course, putting it all through a flannel bag will change it, although I’m not quite sure as to whether the flannel bag is supposed to filter out large pieces or to break the large pieces into smaller pieces.
The New Yorker description mentions a few different tastes in their drink: “smooth, sweet, and spicy.” The London recipe could be sweet, with the sugar, and would be rich, with the milk, and is recognizable as an alcoholic drink, with the brandy, but it isn’t spicy. Another milk punch recipe, from Housekeeping in Old Virginia, from 1878, includes a spice as an ingredient. This was definitely a different time period, as that book placed the recipe in its sickbed recipe section. That recipe is:
Pour two tablespoonfuls good brandy into six tablespoonfuls milk. Add two teaspoonfuls ground loaf sugar and a little grated nutmeg. An adult may take a tablespoonful of this every two or three hours, but children must take less.
Yes, it probably is best if children take a bit less of the drink that includes hard liquor. This recipe is likely closer to the drink the New Yorker reporter had, although it is a pretty simple concoction.
A more complicated drink appears in The Ideal Bartender, from 1917, which appears under “Egg Milk Punch.” That recipe has the bartender fill a bar glass half full of shaved ice, then add an egg (in the early 20th century they added eggs to everything), some sugar, some rum and brandy, and then fill the glass full of milk and shake until the mixture “creams.” It was then filtered and poured into a tall thin glass, with a sprinkling of nutmeg on top.
This is probably getting closer to the modern restaurant’s version of milk punch, but without the fancy spices. Milk punch has been around forever–the New Yorker mentions that Ben Franklin had his own recipe for it–and while it has certainly fallen out of favor it can certainly be resurrected by anyone willing to download some old cookbooks and experiment with some modern variations.