Boots and Saddles

Photo courtesy Flickr

In the spirit of historic preservation, here is a Northwest antique. My great-grandmother was given the recipe for this old cavalry punch from someone at one of the many small forts that guarded the entrance to Puget Sound around 1900. The poet John Ciardi says boots and saddles is a cavalry call from a French root meaning to saddle up.

My experience with Boots and Saddles is that the first glass tastes like liquor, but the third goes down like Kool-Aid. Its ability to impair judgement is, in my experience, unsurpassed.

Find a punch bowl big enough to hold a block of ice, to forestall dilution. A party rental outfit will have something elegant, if you don’t reserve houseroom for one. After World War Two, it was not unusual here to find a surplus Plexiglass B-29 nose holding punch. I use a Victorian washstand pitcher and a ladle. A biology major used a lab crock with a little pinch hose and tiny, uncountable glasses.

Choose a gallon of burgundy. I suspect this punch is a way of soothing the effects of trans-oceanic and cross-country train and wagon travel on nineteenth-century wine. Add half a pint of gin to the wine, more or less to taste. Sweeten not quite to taste with bar syrup made from white sugar mixed with boiling water. This punch is best on the dry side.

Mixing the punch is one of the danger points for intoxication, so make sure the party is ready to go. Add lemon juice to taste. Then add grenadine syrup to taste and a bottle of maraschino cherries. Adjust the sweetness, add the ice, and float seeded lemon slices among the cherries.

I don’t know what they were drinking, but historian Murray Morgan writes of a day in Old Seattle when two ferry boat captains decided to race. The whole town turned out on shore to watch and, no doubt, wager. Seafair opens with the Elliot Bay tug boat races in May or June and closes with the hydroplane race on Lake Washington in August, long the largest single spectator sport of all. Environmental caution closed down the Sammamish slough race, but if you can find old footage, it’s a muddy hoot. People are racing canoes, again, too. The Jamestown s’Klallam race fiberglass canoes with updated traditional designs, almost as if Big Daddy Roth had been their art director.

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