Sometimes you just need a warm drink. It could be whatever – w0rk that makes you feel like you need a brain massage, or weather that yanks your spirit around, or some irritating day grating on you, or just fatigue after too long of going going going. Then, you need to sit down in a warmly lit room with a big dark sky outside and sip a steaming cup o’ love.
So the other day, already anticipating the surfacing of this need, I went to the market and got ingredients for traditional holiday ponche (just in case you didn’t make the connection, that’s punch in English). This is not your wimpy little kindergarten punch diluted with whatever kool-aid and served with ice; huh-uh.
It is spiced and flavored with cinnamon, cloves, raisins, allspice, a good heap of piloncillo (a dense cone of brown sugar), sugar cane, tecojotes (small crab apples whose sourness can’t be stomached raw but blends perfectly into the sweetened punch), pears, pineapple, small yellow guavas, and oranges. The result is sort of an apple cider gone madly tropical – let’s say apple cider takes a vacation down South and goes on a wild mating mission with the local population.
The tecojotes are the punch’s staple. You can play with it from there – adding or subtracting pears, other types of apples, oranges, guavas, pineapple, and raisins and/or prunes. The idea is to get that balance between sweet, sour, and pungent. A good punch has got to have body and spice to it, period. The Mexican version will have sweet and wincingly sour fruits whose combo is played up by warm spices like cinnamon and allspice.
Then, of course, the adults can add a shot of rum, tequila, or mezcal, transforming the ponche into ponche con piquete- punch with a sting. Of course, we got stung.
Added benefit of punch-making: you can gnaw on the raw sugarcane if you manage to find it in your area. I was always puzzled by people doing this at the market or walking down the street – it seemed like they were gnawing on raw, shaved turnips. But damn, once you take a bite into that juicy sweet stalk of sugarcane you get it. It only stays sweet for a few seconds, and for some reason that stimulates you to want to keep sucking and sucking. It gets majorly addictive. I spent the whole afternoon with a stalk of sugarcane dangling from my mouth, hypnotized by the power of ponche long before the first sip.
Ponche Con Piquete
Sometimes you just need a warm drink. It could be whatever – w0rk that makes you feel like you need a brain massage, or weather that yanks your spirit around, or some irritating day grating on you, or just fatigue after too long of going going going. Then, you need to sit down in a warmly lit room with a big dark sky outside and sip a steaming cup o’ love.
So the other day, already anticipating the surfacing of this need, I went to the market and got ingredients for traditional holiday ponche (just in case you didn’t make the connection, that’s punch in English). This is not your wimpy little kindergarten punch diluted with whatever kool-aid and served with ice; huh-uh.
It is spiced and flavored with cinnamon, cloves, raisins, allspice, a good heap of piloncillo (a dense cone of brown sugar), sugar cane, tecojotes (small crab apples whose sourness can’t be stomached raw but blends perfectly into the sweetened punch), pears, pineapple, small yellow guavas, and oranges. The result is sort of an apple cider gone madly tropical – let’s say apple cider takes a vacation down South and goes on a wild mating mission with the local population.
The tecojotes are the punch’s staple. You can play with it from there – adding or subtracting pears, other types of apples, oranges, guavas, pineapple, and raisins and/or prunes. The idea is to get that balance between sweet, sour, and pungent. A good punch has got to have body and spice to it, period. The Mexican version will have sweet and wincingly sour fruits whose combo is played up by warm spices like cinnamon and allspice.
Then, of course, the adults can add a shot of rum, tequila, or mezcal, transforming the ponche into ponche con piquete- punch with a sting. Of course, we got stung.
Added benefit of punch-making: you can gnaw on the raw sugarcane if you manage to find it in your area. I was always puzzled by people doing this at the market or walking down the street – it seemed like they were gnawing on raw, shaved turnips. But damn, once you take a bite into that juicy sweet stalk of sugarcane you get it. It only stays sweet for a few seconds, and for some reason that stimulates you to want to keep sucking and sucking. It gets majorly addictive. I spent the whole afternoon with a stalk of sugarcane dangling from my mouth, hypnotized by the power of ponche long before the first sip.