The holidays were made for the closet bartender. A parade of special gatherings of family and friends where you can show off the skills you painstakingly honed in fits of alcoholic Covid boredom. Which is fine for the intimate gathering where people are likely to put up with your tedious mixology theatrics. If you’re dealing with a mob of friends, none of whom are going to settle down until after New Year’s, you’ll need something bigger. And you could do worse than the holiday punch.
I don’t mean the undergrad party-in-a-garbage-can stuff. You want something with style. If you approach it with the right spirit, a good holiday punch is actually like a great craft cocktail played out on a much larger stage … or bowl. It is something different that you can make your own with a clever twist. By that I mean that if you screw it up, just dump in some more champagne. So, with Christmas behind us but the show not quite over, I give you a tale of two holiday punches — but I can only share the recipe for one of them.
A lot of people around town have received and sampled some Fortuné Jaubert Christmas Punch — an old New Orleans concoction of my great-grandfather’s consisting of fruit, wine and whiskey, and, inconveniently, time. You really do need about a week to make it correctly. I only got the recipe by arguing birthright with my grandmother, so I can’t give you the recipe without getting disowned by my Jaubert relatives. Honestly, you don’t have the time to make it anyway, so I guess that we’re even.
The same grandmother also produced a New Year’s Day punch that is not nearly so mysterious and much less involved. You don’t have to keep it to New Year’s Day, but if you are old-school enough to actually have a party on “the day after,” it is the perfect punch. Gran was a very social creature so her recipe was for 40 guests:
• 5 gallons of French vanilla ice cream
• 12 cups of dark roast coffee
• A fifth of bourbon
Put the ice cream in the bowl first — and here you want to get French vanilla, not just the plain stuff — then the bourbon, followed by the java. The hot coffee melts the ice cream pretty quickly so you only need to give it a stir or two of a long spoon to get the right consistency. The beauty of this one is that you can whip up a punch for 40 people with about three minutes of prep time.
Granted, twoscore wildly hungover people pummeling what’s left of your holiday cheer on New Year’s Day isn’t for everyone. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a five-gallon drum of ice cream and, let’s face it, sometime about a year ago we seem to have lost the ability to interact on a grand scale. If you buy one gallon of ice cream, just divide everything by five. Hint: a gallon and a pint of ice cream matches a pint of bourbon. Tweak to taste.
Apart from being hella easy to make, the New Year’s Day punch has the benefit of being a hangover cure that would make our man Jeeves proud. The ice cream is a nice coating for a stomach lining ravaged by merry excess, the bourbon is a smallish nip of hair of the dog without too much bite, and the coffee is a wake-me-up that pushes it all through the system. It’s a great day-drinker in the bargain because it doesn’t really pack too much of a wallop, and as you’ve been hitting the sauce pretty hard since November, you really might want to settle down, Spanky.
Although, admittedly, it is not going to do that Holiday Seven you’ve gained any favors.