A DROP TO MAKE YOU CRAZY

ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND RUM PUNCH: A LOVE STORY

VIN CHAUD.

Being on a hilltop, Montparnasse is breezy, which makes its warm and cosy cafes doubly tempting at this time of year. How agreeable, in a chilly January, to take a table and, looking out on the pedestrians driven up Boulevard Raspail by an icy north wind, sip something hot and reviving.

The commonest winter drink offered by cafés is vin chaud – mulled wine.  I often make it at home, heating a litre of vin rouge with palm sugar, clove, anise, cinnamon, ginger and orange slices, leaving it to steep, then decanting and re-heating as needed.

But cafes are impatient with any hot beverage beyond coffee and the various tisanes. Most just drop a sachet of spices into a tumbler of bog-standard vin rouge, zap it with steam from the espresso machine, and add an orange slice.

If I twist his arm, pleading I’m unrhumé, about to succumb to la grippe, the barman of my favourite café has been known to mix honey, lemon juice and a clove, add hot water, a shot of whisky – Japanese blended: no point in wasting the good stuff –  and a cinnamon stick to stir.

“Voila,” he’ll say, pushing the thick glass tumbler across the zinc. “Ton toddy.”

Lifting the pastis he keeps hidden just out of sight, he toasts me. “Sante!”

A toddy’s not to be sneezed at, but the winter drink I’d most like to try has so far evaded me. It comes recommnded by none other than  Ernest Hemingway.

THE CAFE DU DOME IN THE ‘TWENTIES, WITH CHARCOAL HEATERS.

"And we sit outside the Dôme Café," he wrote in  a letter to Sherwood Anderson in 1923, "warmed up against one of those charcoal brazziers and it’s so damned cold outside and the brazzier makes it so warm and we drink rum punch, hot, and the rhum enters into us like the Holy Spirit."

The Café du Dôme is still in business, but rum punch has gone the way of those charcoal heaters, replaced by less robust (and warming) Martinis and Bloody Marys. Nobody remembers what went into this apparently transcendental potion, and the standard cocktail books are no better.

Clearly this punch bears no resemblance to the timid mixture of that name ladled out at wedding receptions and high-school proms, a melange of fruit juices, sometimes improved with fizzy white wine or, with luck, a surreptitious pint of vodka.  

Nor, I suspect, is in related, except distantly, to Hot Buttered Rum. Would an Olympic,  indeed Nobel-class drinker like Ernie allow a dairy product to insinuate itself between himself and a glass?

HEMINGWAY IN FULL CRY.

Adding further to the confusion, France does have a drink called punch. At brocantes on the more exotic edges of Paris, you’ll find stalls selling Caribbean snacks. Next to the heaps of Jamaican meat patties and spicy salt-cod batter accras are glass vessels filled with murky yellow-green fluid in which floats objects of indeterminate character and origin. This punch – pronounced ponch – arrived with West Indian emigrants post-World War II, and became so popular that there are now commercially bottled versions. Ingredients include sugar and various spices - star anise, cinnamon, cloves, ginger - but mostly rum.  

Many cafés serve Punch Antillais but none, as far as I know, heat it. That would drive off the alcohol, something alien to Hemingway, who never met a rum he didn’t like.  

He wasn’t alone in this enthusiasm. Rum is as dear to the hearts of the French as gin to the British, particular if they served in the armed forces or held a diplomatic post in Africa or the Caribbean.

During World War I, each poilu or infantryman carried two two-litre canteens, one filled with a mixture of water and pinard, aka vin rouge, the other with tafia, a variety of rum so potent that officers doled out extra tots before an assault - “Pour rendre fou,” they explained: to make you crazy.

Haiti-ian rum was aged in wooden casks that absorbed impurities but also reduced the alcohol level. Tafia enjoyed no such refinement. It came straight from the still, poisons and potency intact. To check the quality, soldiers mixed it with gunpowder and applied a match. If it exploded, they got stuck in.  One feels Hemingway, always a military man at heart, would have approved.

After combing the internet, I’ve reconstructed a drink that might resemble what the Dome served back in the thirsty ‘twenties. I like to think it would warm even the cockles of Hemingway’s well-pickled heart.

To two litres of hard cider, add an orange, sliced; an inch of fresh ginger, thinly sliced; six cloves, six black peppercorns, and a large black cardamom.  Simmer for twenty minutes, strain, allow to cool slightly, then add two cups of dark rum – and maybe a grain or two of gunpowder.