On 11 October 1763, Benjamin Franklin wrote to James Bowdoin — Boston merchant, natural philosopher, later governor of Massachusetts — taking his leave before returning to Philadelphia, and enclosed a recipe headed “To make Milk Punch.” The manuscript survives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is a pleasing thing for a drink recipe to be able to say. The two corresponded for forty years, mostly about science.
This is that punch in modern proportions: brandy, citrus, sugar and water, combined with boiling milk, then strained of the solids.
⚠ The detail modern accounts skate over is the boiling milk. Franklin’s method, like most of the period, brings the milk to the boil before it meets the acid. Modern practice generally uses it warm. Both curdle — acid coagulates casein at any temperature — but heat changes the curd’s texture and speed, and it is one of several places where the historical method and the current one have quietly diverged with nobody saying so.
Made this way it is a considerably stronger drink than most modern milk punches, which matters for how it keeps.
Ingredients
- 750 ml brandy or cognac — VSOP is right, VS is fine
- 6 lemons — peel and juice
- 250 g sugar
- 500 ml whole milk
- 250 ml water
- 1 whole nutmeg, for grating
Directions
- Peel the lemons in wide strips, no pith. Toss with the sugar and leave several hours or overnight to draw the oil out.
- Juice the lemons — about 200 ml.
- Stir the oleo saccharum until the sugar has dissolved. Strain out the peels.
- Combine the brandy, the oleo syrup and the water. Hold back the lemon juice.
- Bring the milk to a boil in a large vessel — large enough to take everything with headroom — then take it off the heat. ⚠ Watch it; milk boils over in a second.
- Add the lemon juice to the punch, stir once.
- 🔴 Pour the punch into the hot milk, slowly. It curdles instantly and hard.
- One gentle stir, then leave it. Let it cool and rest — overnight is best.
- Filter through damp cheesecloth. Do not squeeze.
- Pass it back through the curd bed until clear.
- Bottle, grate nutmeg in, seal.
Notes
Why this one is stronger, and what that buys. 750 ml of 40% brandy into roughly 1,150 ml finished is about 26% ABV — which is the band where alcohol genuinely does the preserving, and it is why the 18th-century article could sit in a cupboard. That is what the “keeps indefinitely” line actually describes.
⭐ This is the version to make if you want the historical keeping quality, and it is the more interesting one to taste against the modern rum batch, which is milder and needs the fridge.
⚠ Boiling milk is fussier than warm milk. It scorches easily, and a scorched note survives filtration. Use a heavy pan, watch it, and take it off the moment it lifts.
On the recipe itself: the proportions above are a modern working reconstruction, not a transcription. Franklin’s original is a period document with period measures, and anyone claiming to have reproduced it exactly is doing more interpreting than they are admitting.
Nutmeg is not optional. It is in Franklin’s recipe and in most of the period ones, and freshly grated it is most of what the finished punch smells like.
The history in full — including why the Aphra Behn attribution is second-hand hearsay and Mary Rockett’s 1711 recipe is the earliest written one — is at brewing.fubsypoly.com/mixed-drinks/clarified-milk-punch/