Good day, Wonkaholics! And a very merry drinking season to you, as well. We cannot overstate the importance of maintaining a respectable blood alcohol level if we are ever going to win this War on Christmas. It is also a wonderful time of year to introduce the youths in your family to the joys of chemical dependence. To those ends, let us prepare a bowl of rum punch, and leave it unsupervised, out for anyone who happens along.
Sure, egg nog gets more hype during the holidays, and it is a fine beverage indeed. But some of your family and friends get the shits from milk, and others are giant whiny babies about eating eggs which have not had heat applied to them. So let's get fruity.
This is really more of a method recipe, as the particular fruits and boozes can be adjusted to taste and availability. The key to a good punch is a lot of liquor. The secret to a good punch is something known as oleo saccharum (Latin for "mixture of sweet scrotums"), which is where you take citrus peels, mix them with sugar, and wait for the magic to happen.
Rum Punch
3-5 Lemons
1-2 Grapefruits
2-3 Oranges
1 Lime
Superfine Sugar (regular granulated will work)
Spiced Rum
White Rum
Orange Liqueur
Gin
Nutmeg
Allspice
Ice
Soda (optional, could be club soda or ginger ale)
Cut the peels off the citrus in one-inch-wide strips, taking care to get as little of the bitter white pith as possible. Put them all in a large bowl (like the kind that you might use to serve punch), and pour in enough sugar to coat them all. Use a muddler or your hands to mix this up. Really rub the sugar into the peels. Sprinkle with a little bit of nutmeg and allspice. Cover the container with plastic wrap, and let it sit for a few hours; the sugar will melt away, and the delicious essential oils will exude out of the peels. This is the oleo saccharum. Alternatively, you can use Jeffrey Morgenthaler's shortcut method, but you will need a vacuum sealer for that.
Juice the fruit into one of those glass measuring cups, so you know how much juice you're working with. Set that aside. Note that whatever citrus you have around will work just fine. We prefer to have a good amount of lemons and/or limes in there, to keep the final product from being too cloyingly sweet. You have a pineapple handy? Great! Cut it up, and add the juice from your cutting board to the citrus juice.
Now for the math part of making punch. You need a good booze to juice ratio, something like 1.5 parts booze to one part juice. To figure the amount of booze you will need, multiply the volume of the juice by one-and-a-half. You will notice that there are several types of liquor going into this thing. The ratio for the boozes is 4: 4:2:1. That's four parts spiced rum, four parts white rum, two parts gin, and one part orange liqueur. So divide the total amount of booze you need by eleven, and do one of those of Cointreau, two of those of gin, and four each of the rums. Got it? No? Just pour a ton of liquor, mostly rum, into the bowl with the oleo saccharum.
This is a good time to mention booze variations. Any liqueur you like can replace the orange liqueur (but you should probably shy away from krautinger for this punch). You can swap out or supplement the gin with whiskey or brandy.
Add a ton of ice and the juice you have set aside. If you are concerned about the ice watering your fix down, omit it, and chill the punch in the fridge or outside if you live where the weather is cold.
Put a bucket of ice and the soda beside the punch bowl, and add as much or as little soda to each cup as you like. Sparkling wine works great, too. Or don't add anything with bubbles; I don't give a shit. Garnish with citrus wedges, pineapple slices, or maraschino cherries.
Hooray, you have punch now! For the holidays!
It is like Santa dropped off the gift of the year!
The gift of the entirely-believable excuse. The best kind.