Milk Punch, Brandy and Rum Shaken with Milk
Reader ratingsA wine-glass of Cognac and half as much St. Croix rum, shaken with sugar, shaved ice and milk to fill the glass, topped with nutmeg: Jerry Thomas’s Milk Punch of 1862, eggnog without the egg.
- Recipe makes
- 1 drink
- Prep
- Total
Milk punch in a pressed-glass tumbler over crushed ice, dusted with nutmeg.
The story behind the recipe
Jerry Thomas’s Milk Punch is Cognac and Santa Cruz rum shaken with sugar, shaved ice and as much milk as the large bar glass will hold, with nutmeg grated on top. He printed it as No. 22 in How to Mix Drinks (New York, 1862), and it asks for nothing that needs cooking, so the whole drink takes as long as the shaking.
Common milk punch
Milk punch was ordinary enough by then to serve as a base for other drinks. Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife (1839) explains two of them in a line: “Apple and quince punch are nothing more than baked apples or quinces put into common milk punch.” Her own milk punch has no measures at all. She tells the cook to thin rum or brandy with sweet milk to whatever strength is wanted and to sweeten it, with ice and nutmeg.
An English drink of the same name was something else. Oxford Night Caps (1847) makes its milk punch by the batch: water and new milk with sugar, lemon juice and a quart of white brandy, strained through flannel and bottled, and the book says it keeps for ten days or a fortnight in a cool cellar. Thomas’s is shaken to order and drunk at once, still white with milk. On the next page he gives a Hot Milk Punch, made with hot milk and no ice.
Read more about this recipe
Fill with milk
Thomas measures the spirits and then stops. The wine-glass of the day held 2 fluid ounces by William Kitchiner’s reckoning, which puts 2 fl oz of Cognac and 1 fl oz of rum in the glass; after that, “fill with milk” leaves the strength to the size of the tumbler, much as Bryan left it to the cook. He never says how big a large bar glass is. Reading it as 12 ounces, a third of it in shaved ice is about 1/2 cup of crushed ice and the milk that fills the rest is about 1/2 cup more, our measure. Pour in extra and the punch gets milder. Made as written here, the punch is about 13% alcohol once its ice has melted.
The alcohol-free routes to milk and egg are Lettice Bryan’s Egg Gruel, heated gently in a saucepan, and TuneMyRecipe’s Vanilla Milk Punch Mocktail (opens in a new tab), from a 1920 book, shaken with a raw egg and vanilla. Thomas shakes an egg into his own Egg Nogg, and the hot British relations of these milk drinks, flips of ale or wine poured onto beaten eggs, are in How Was Eggnog First Made?
(Use large bar glass.)
1 table-spoonful of fine white sugar.
2 do. water.
1 wine-glass of Cognac brandy.
½ do. Santa Cruz rum.
⅓ Tumblerful of shaved ice.
Fill with milk, shake the ingredients well together, and grate a little nutmeg on top.
Recipe makes: 1 drink
Ingredients
For 1 drink. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for 1 drink.
- Superfine sugar1 tbsp
- Water2 tbsp
- Cognac2 fl oz
- St. Croix rum1 fl oz
- Crushed ice1/2 cup
- Whole milk1/2 cup
- Grated nutmeg, to finish
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 1 tbsp superfine sugar
- 2 tbsp water
- 2 fl oz Cognac
- 1 fl oz St. Croix rum
- 1/2 cup crushed ice
- 1/2 cup whole milk
- grated nutmeg, to finish
Equipment
Cocktail shaker
Large tumbler, about 12 fl oz
Nutmeg grater
Instructions
Dissolve the superfine sugar in the water, stirring the two together in the shaker.
Pour in the Cognac and St. Croix rum, add the crushed ice, and fill up with the whole milk.
Cap the shaker and shake it hard, about 10 seconds and no longer.
Tip the whole lot, ice and all, straight into a large tumbler without straining.
Finish with a light grating of nutmeg and drink it right away.
Nutrition
320calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- 1 drink
Estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for 80-proof spirits, whole milk and granulated sugar.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
This is one drink. Shake no more than two at a time.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Thomas’s milk punch takes two tablespoons of water to dissolve its sugar, twice what his eggnog uses.
For Thomas’s Hot Milk Punch, leave out the ice and stir the sugar water and spirits with 3/4 cup of hot milk in a warmed mug (our amount and method; Thomas says only hot milk and no ice).
Keep the shaking short: crushed ice melts fast and thins the milk.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment.
Sources and attribution
Jerry Thomas, How to Mix Drinks, or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1862), No. 22, p. 19
See the original pages (scan at Internet Archive) (opens in a new tab)
Recipe details
- Drink family
- Cocktails & Mixed Drinks
- Region
- American
- Era
- 19th century
- Source decade
- 1860s
- Difficulty
- Easy