Milk Punch, New Orleans Brandy

🔴 This is a completely different drink that happens to share a name with clarified milk punch, and treating either as a version of the other gets both wrong.

Where the English drink uses milk as a filter and throws it away, this one uses milk as the body of the drink and keeps it. Where that one is made days ahead in a batch and keeps for months, this is shaken to order in ten seconds and separates in minutes. Where that one is clear, this is opaque.

It belongs to the New Orleans breakfast drinking tradition — a small, coherent group of drinks the city has long considered appropriate before noon, alongside the Ramos Gin Fizz and, at a stretch, the Sazerac. Brennan’s, Commander’s Palace and Arnaud’s are the addresses.

Judged as what it is — a gentle, creamy, vanilla-and-nutmeg thing at eleven in the morning — a good one is very good.

Ingredients

• 2 oz brandy (bourbon is the common and entirely legitimate alternative)
• 3 oz whole milk, or milk and half-and-half
• 1 tsp powdered sugar, or 1/2 oz simple syrup
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• Ice
• Freshly grated nutmeg, to finish

Directions

1. Brandy, milk, sugar and vanilla into a shaker.
2. Add ice and shake hard — 12–15 seconds. The texture is the whole appeal and a lazy shake gives a thin, separated drink.
3. Strain into a chilled glass.
4. Grate nutmeg over the top, fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg is dust and tastes of it.

Notes

Do not over-sweeten. Powdered sugar dissolves instantly, which makes it very easy to overdo. Start below where you think you want it.

Vanilla is a supporting note, not a flavour. A quarter-teaspoon. A splash makes it taste like a milkshake, which is a different and lesser drink.

Make it fresh. It separates within minutes — the exact opposite of the clarified drink, and the clearest illustration of how little the two have in common.

Frozen brandy milk punch — the same thing spun in a frozen-drink machine — is a New Orleans institution in its own right and is what many bars actually serve.

⚠ It is more alcoholic than it tastes, which is true of every drink where dairy and sugar mask the spirit. Worth remembering about something served at brunch.

Neighbours in this collection: Eggnog, Aged, Alton Brown’s is the closest relative — the same family with egg added — and Syllabub, Lemon is the 17th-century English ancestor that curdles on purpose and keeps the curd, which puts it interestingly between the two milk punches.

Why two drinks share the name: brewing.fubsypoly.com/mixed-drinks/clarified-milk-punch/