The twenty-five recipes for Milk Punch in my database all contain similar ingredients: milk, rum or brandy, nutmeg, sugar.
For years now I’ve been intending to make one of these recipes for eggnog’s cousin (or rival, depending on who you ask).
It was only this year that I noticed that these punch recipes, with their similar ingredients, fall into two different camps, with wildly different results.
The recipe I chose is one of several that involve the addition of citrus juice and peel. The milk curdles and is strained off, leaving a clarified product. The result is not so much eggnog’s cousin as a distant DNA relative.
I just couldn’t resist the appeal of a process to turn a cloudy mixture of milk, lemons, and liquor into a clear beverage with a long shelf life.
Clarified Milk Punch dates to the 17th century, and appears in some of Maryland’s oldest cookbooks. The two recipes in Mrs. B.C. Howard’s 1873 cookbook “Fifty Years in a Maryland Kitchen” are both entitled “India Milk Punch.” Both end not by boasting about the flavor, but the fact that the punch “will keep for a year or more.”
A book of recipes donated by Dr. George Dobbin Brown to the Maryland Center of History and Culture dates to around the same time. It’s Milk Punch recipe is very similar, with the addition of nutmeg. This is the recipe that I followed.
Continue reading “Milk Punch, Cookery Notebook of George Dobbin Brown”