Southside Sips: Rum Punch

Rum and juice. It’s the sunshine on a cloudy day. And these days, goodness, that’s most every day.

We know we’re getting to the end of this dreary, snow-dumped winter. We know it! We can feel it! This Sunday is Daylight Savings, for Pete’s sake! If that doesn’t feel like the preamble to spring, we don’t know what does.

But if you’d like to hurry it up a little, at least tonight, with rain in the forecast and yet another nasty, bone-chilling evening on the docket, we say: Go rum or go home. Or better, have rum at home!

Rum Punch is as old as George Washington’s teeth. Older, really. The first official Caribbean rum distillery opened in 1703 in Barbados, but there’s evidence of the distillate being made long before that, and with pretty much all sugar-producing regions following suit, making the sweet, spirited liquor from the byproduct of cane sugar (and, at times, directly from the can sugar, aka agricole rum). It was the chosen spirit of merchants, sailors and Colonial taverns (all done on the backs of slaves and indentured workers, lest we forget our lessons in Triangle Trade).

There’s an unattributed rhyme rum-loving bartenders occasionally pull out when the topic of rum punch and the historical like are at hand:

One of sour, two of sweet.
Three of strong, four of weak.

It’s a good way to remember the parameters of solid, basic rum punch, including this one from our friends over at Bumbu, a lovely Brazilian rum that you can nab at Race Lane Wine & Liquor (21 Race Lane, East Hampton, 631-324-4595). Here, the sour is the citrus, the sweet the pineapple, the strong the Bumbu and the weak the club soda. Easy-peezy. Shake up a little sunshine, friends — we swear, the spring is almost here.