Last week on Tasting History we made a medieval Arab candy, and discussed the
rather happy-go-lucky history of sugar up through the year 1492, but as the sweet stuff makes its way
over to the New World the story gets a little less happy-go-lucky. And so I'm gonna need a drink and
that's why today we are making an historic sugar and rum-based drink called Victoria Punch.
So get ready for a cocktail as we delve into the darker side of the history of sugar,
this time on Tasting History.
Der Völler , 1804 - Georg Emanuel Opitz
Now before we get started I wanted to let you know that this Sunday November 1st at
noon Pacific standard time i'm going to be doing a live stream where I teach you how to make Election
Cake just in time for the U.S. Presidential Election next week. No talk of politics, just
cake and history, two of my favorite things, and I'm actually going to put the recipe for that cake
in the description of this video so you can prep yourself and have everything ready in case you
want to follow along. Now going back to today's recipe it's kind of perfect for the topic that
we're talking about because not only is the drink made with sugar but it's also made with rum which
is made from sugar cane. Anyway the recipe comes from Jerry Thomas's 1862 book "How To Mix Drinks
or The Bon-Vivant's Companion."
"Thirty-Second Regiment or Victoria Punch. (For a party of twenty)
Six lemons in slices one half gallon of brandy, one half ditto jamaican rum
one pound of white sugar one and three fourths quart of water
one pint of boiling milk
steep the lemons for 24 hours in the brandy and rum add the sugar water and milk,
and when well mixed strain through a jelly bag.
This punch may be bottled and used afterward hot or cold.
Half of the above quantity or even less may be made as this recipe is for a party of 20.
As I am not a party of 20 I'm going to be quartering this recipe,
and making it for a party of five, but if you want to make the full amount for 20 people or if you're
just having a really bad weekend go ahead and follow the exact instructions that Jerry Thomas
lays out because he's actually rather succinct in his proportions and ingredients but for a
party of five what you'll need is: one and one half lemons sliced, 2 cups or 475 milliliters of brandy,
2 cups or 475 milliliters jamaican rum.
Now he's not specific if it's a dark rum or a light rum but I think either one would work just fine.
I'm going to use a dark rum but I would steer away from any kind of flavored rums
like a spiced rum or Malibu uh any kind of coconut that's not right for this
One half cup plus two tablespoons or 120 grams of white sugar one,
one and three-fourths cup or 415 milliliters of water,
one half cup or 118 milliliters boiling milk.
Then you'll need either two pitchers or one pitcher,
and a punch bowl along with something to filter the drink.
You can use either a jelly bag or a coffee filter.
I'm actually using the same filter that I used in the hippocras
video in lieu of a hippocratic sleeve.
Turns out I make quite a few drinks on this channel and
that's okay. So first a word about the name or names of this punch
because there are actually two.
It could be called 32nd Regiment Punch or it could be called Victoria Punch
because it was actually probably made by members of the 32nd regiment
around 1830 when they were in Canada fighting the Canadian rebellions,
but then in 1837 when Queen Victoria took the throne
it's likely that they named it after their new sovereign.
Two names, one punch. :|
Now the recipe like most cocktails is rather straightforward and pretty easy but it takes a long time to
make so if you're in a hurry for a drink go mix yourself a martini, but if you have time to wait
then the first thing you'll need to do is slice your lemons. Then add them to a pitcher, then
pour the brandy over them, and the rum and give everything a gentle mix trying not to agitate the
lemons too much. Then cover the pitcher and let it sit undisturbed at room temperature for 24 hours.
Now once a day has passed go ahead and boil your milk.
So a word about the milk um because it's kind
of an interesting ingredient. It's really the one thing that makes this punch kind of stand out as
like huh? And the thing is there's lemon in the cocktail and you're gonna pour milk into it
it's going to curdle but that's OK.
So uncover your pitcher and add the sugar, the water
and the boiling milk, then stir vigorously until most of the sugar has dissolved.
then place the filter or the jelly bag over the second pitcher or the punch bowl and slowly
pour the punch through it, because I think it is straining out curdled milk the straining process
actually takes quite a while it doesn't just like filter through really quickly. I actually ended
up having to like milk the the bag it was really gross,
but you know it worked.
Now because you just added boiled milk to this cocktail it's going to be kind of like a weird lukewarm temperature,
and he says to serve it either cold or hot so I'm going to take some and put it in the refrigerator
and I'm going to take a bit and put it over the stove to heat it up,
and while I do that we can pick up where we left off last week with the history of sugar
now if you didn't see that first video
you don't have to watch them in order but if you want to i'm going to put a link up here
in the description to where you can see that.
So up to now sugar has led a wonderful and exciting journey
from the east in India coming all the way through Arabia and North Africa and
then north up into Europe, but now it's about to head west and things are about to go south.
Sugarcane had been growing on the Isle of Madeira and in the Canary Islands for centuries
when on his second voyage Christopher Columbus took some along with him to plant in the Caribbean.
Now the tropical climate of the Caribbean was going to be perfect for cultivating this crop
but it requires a lot of manpower and it turns out that not a lot of Europeans were too excited
to travel halfway across the world to a new land to cultivate sugar. So the Spanish were going to
have to rely on the native population called the Taíno for most of the hard labor.
Now nobody knows exactly how many Taínos lived in the Caribbean before Columbus arrived
but the number is probably between two and five million
but their population absolutely cratered once the Spanish came.
Bartolome de las Casas who was a contemporary Spanish priest wrote of the island of Hispaniola
"There were 60,000 people living on this island [when i arrived in 1508], including the Indians;
so that from 1494 to 1508, over 3 million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines.
Who in future generations will believe this?"
Now his his figure of 3 million was actually probably rather inflated it was probably closer to
either 600,000 or a million somewhere in there, but
that's still over 90% of the native population dead in just over a decade, and then with the influx of
diseases like smallpox and measles their numbers were even decimated further so that by the end of
the 16th century they were almost extinct in the Caribbean.
So with their population of native slave labor diminished,
and their their sugar plantations in jeopardy the Europeans had to look elsewhere
for labor,
and the answer came in 1505 when the first slave ship from Africa landed on the isle of Hispaniola.
Now the other European powers of course wanted to emulate Spain's success
and the first that did so was Portugal.
Shortly after conquering Brazil in 1540 the Portuguese had over 2,000 sugar
mills up and running on the mainland alone.
And while they brought some indentured servants with
them from Europe the majority of their labor came from their colonies in Africa who were slaves,
and the slave trade absolutely boomed.
England was a little later to the game and when they started
they brought their indentured servants from Ireland but again there just weren't enough so
they too got in on the slave trade bringing 335,000 of them
over to Jamaica alone between 1748 and 1788.
Even sadder was that the vast majority of those Africans coming over
died within just a few years because of the horrific conditions of working on the plantations.
Now with all of this new sugar coming from the New World the Venetian sugar trade which
had dominated Europe for hundreds of years completely collapsed, and the amount of the
crop that was grown on Madeira and in the Canary Islands fell by 90 percent in just a few decades.
Not before German physician and botanist Tabernaemonteanus could make one more claim for the health benefits of sugar .
"Nice white sugar from Madeira and the Canaries, when taken moderately cleans
the blood, strengthens body and mind, especially chest, lungs and throat,
but also makes the teeth blunt and makes them decay.
As a powder it is good for the eyes, as a smoke it is good for the common cold
as flour sprinkled on wounds it heals them."
So a few things to unpack there.
First I didn't know you could smoke sugar.
Im curious exactly how that worked. Second the powdered sugar good
for the eyes. Are you eating the powdered sugar or are you putting powdered sugar in your eye because
that doesn't seem good. I also think it's cool because I feel like this is the first reference
I've found at least to somebody admitting that sugar might not be great for your teeth.
Anyway all of this newfound sugar coming into Europe completely changed the way that it was eaten.
Up until now most people got their sweetener from honey and
only the very wealthy could afford the lavish luxury of sugar but
as supply soared prices fell making way for sugar to come to us,
the great unwashed masses.
Well as an aristocrat you can just imagine how galling it was
to see your servant eating sugar.
Aristocrat Andy: "Darling if it's good enough for the maid then it's not good enough for me."
And so sugar kind of fell out amongst the elite at least as far as being in pretty much
everything as it had been in Renaissance cuisine, and it was all but relegated
to desserts. But with this new audience sugar found an array of new uses that became popular
amongst the middle classes including jams and candy, and a new sweetened version of cocoa
called chocolate.
It also made a wonderful addition to those new drinks taking Europe by storm: tea and coffee.
But one of its most ingenious uses actually came from the molasses that was left over after
refining, and that is the spirit adored by pirates and tiki drink lovers alike (guilty), rum.
Though rum like spirits had actually been made from sugar before this going back thousands of years to
India, but what we think of as rum today came from the Caribbean.
So with all these newfound uses for sugar it's no wonder
that sugar usage in great Britain alone rose 500% in the mid-18th
century, and it actually replaced grain as the most valuable commodity in Europe.
BUT!
as the champ, rises new contenders must enter the ring.
In 1791 The Slave Trade Abolition Bill failed to pass in the British Parliament
and abolitionists all over the empire decided to boycott slave
grown sugar, opting instead for the sugar grown in India which was grown under also horrific
circumstances, but that's neither here nor there.
And in the new country of America
abolitionists urged people to use maple sugar
but Caribbean sugarcane's greatest competition
actually came out of one of Napoleon Bonaparte's greatest blunders.
In 1806 the little corporal established the continental blockade
forbidding his European allies to trade with great Britain
Sounds great, but there were a few issues. The first problem was that Great Britain's navy was
just better than France's, so while France stopped Great Britain ships from getting to the continent,
Great Britain stopped a lot of French ships from getting there as well.
Also Britain had a bit of a habit of looking the other way when privateers or pirates took over French ships
carrying sugar from their colonies in the Caribbean.
Lastly most of the allies that France had who were sneaking in
sugar for them kind of started hating them just as much as the British did,
so what was Napoleon to do?
Enter: sugar beets.
Back in 1747 Prussian chemist Andrea Sigismund Margraff discovered
that certain beets contained large quantities of sucrose, and by the 19th century
his student Franz Karl Achard
had figured out a way to extract enough of that sucrose to make it commercially
viable. It was perfect timing for Napoleon who ended up having sugar beet mills built
all over his burgeoning empire,
but then Waterloo happened and after Napoleon went away
most people went back to eating sugarcane because
frankly it tasted better.
But sugar beets stuck around
and today they actually make up 20% of our sugar supply.
Now we covered sugar in the Old World
and we covered sugar in the New World,
and back to the Old World
but there's one place that we haven't talked about
and that is one of my favorite places on earth
that has a long and very sad history around sugar,
Hawaii.
In 1778 when Captain James Cook
arrived on the isle of Kauai he recorded
"...we could observe several plantations of plantains and sugar-canes."
Now Hawaiians had been growing the crop for the better part of a thousand years,
but they didn't use the crystals,
they just use the juice to sweeten some of their foods.
And if you've ever had purple taro you
know it could probably use a little sweetener so good on them.
Over the next 50 years sugar mills
popped up all over the islands, but it was in 1848 and the Great Mahele that really changed
sugar production and Hawaii forever.
In an effort to protect Hawaiian lands from foreign settlers
King Kamehameha III devised an act known as The Great Mahele.
The act introduced the concept of
private property to the Hawaiian islands,
and it was actually in an effort to keep most of the land
in the hands of either the king or his people the Hawaiian people themselves, but through a
series of loopholes and machinations which still actually cause a lot of controversy to this day
most of the lands that did not belong to the king
ended up in the hands of the families of
American missionaries, or their descendants.
And what they did with the land was built sugar plantations.
Now as we saw in the Caribbean sugarcane takes a lot of manpower to grow in great quantities,
and just like in the Caribbean most of the native population had been wiped out from disease.
Do we see a pattern here?
Luckily they did not resort to slavery instead
there was a great influx of immigration from Portugal, Japan, China
and the Philippines and a host of other countries,
and they took up working in the fields.
Now the industry absolutely exploded during the American Civil War
because the Union couldn't get sugar up from the Caribbean and the South as easily so they
resorted to that coming from the Hawaiian islands,
and by 1890 the sugar planters had gained so much wealth and power
on the islands that the king David Kalakaua
actually was deeply in debt to them, and then when he died
and his sister Liliʻuokalani took the throne
the planters ended up a few years later deposing her in a coup.
There's actually a wonderful book that she the the queen actually
wrote about those final years of the monarchy,
and i'll put a link in the description,
there's a great audiobook that we listened to on our last trip to Hawaii.
It's wonderful and heartbreaking
A few years after they deposed the queen the sugar planters and other wealthy merchants on the island
ended up petitioning the U.S. government to annex Hawaii and in 1898 they did,
making Hawaii a territory of the U.S.
So yeah, as you can see the last 500 years of sugar's history has kind of been
a downer, mixed bag at best, and after covering this history section,
I think it's time for a drink.
So once it's chilled or heated our Victoria Punch is all ready to go.
So here we are.
I've got my cold punch in this fancy glass, and my hot punch in my R2-D2 mug.
BuT! before I go ahead and taste these I want to share a little poem
from the 19th century on how to make punch.
"A little sugar to make it sweet,
a little lemon to make it sour,
a little water to make it weak,
and a little brandy to give it power."
So i'm expecting these to have quite a bit
of power quite a bit of punch if you will,
because not only do we have brandy but we also have rum.
All right so i'm going to go with
the hot one first.
Whoo!
Really like clears out the nostrils.
That kind of reminds me of the hippocras though very different.
It's hot.
it's really, really good. :)
Oh my gosh! That's really, really good. :D
I will take that any day. Oh that is really nice.
So it's kind of sweet but it's not sickly sweet.
And you're - it's very citrusy, but it's almost more orange than lemon.
Really, really interesting i don't know what the the milk does but it's very smooth maybe maybe milk is smooth,
i don't know. Maybe that that does something um i really don't know.
Trying the cold one.
Two hands, I'm afraid of spilling.
That's so good.
Kind of reminds me of a Mai Tai but it's not as
it's not as sickly sweet as some Mai Tai's can be.
It's just, it's just sweet and it's smooth and -
Oh! That's dangerous.
So I am actually, I would finish these right -
I'm probably going to finish this one right now, it is brunch
because i'm filming this at like 8 AM.
I'm not going to drink too much,
quite yet. <_<
Oh man, that is really good, and yeah.
So don't forget that this Sunday November 1st
at noon Pacific standard time join me here on Tasting History for a live stream where I will
show you how to make Election Cake,
and yeah!
I will see you then on Tasting History.
Cheers!
Hm. :)
"Rum Punch!"
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