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and tinned if really necessary)

Ice cubes

Stone, cut up and soak the peaches as above. Put the cider in the refrigerator for a couple of hours beforehand. When the time comes, mix in the white wine, the peach wine and the vodka. Fill your jug, add ice, stir and pour, adding the chilled cider to each glass in the proportion of two from the jug to one from the bottle. Serve immediately.

Notes. (i) This will give you about sixty generous glasses at an outlay of about 15p each. If you can undercut me with anything similar, as strong and non-poisonous, I shall be interested to hear from you.

(ii) These British fruit wines are fortified up to a strength approaching that of sherry or vermouth—and sell at about 70p a bottle, which makes them, strength against price, an excellent buy. One would not perhaps want to drink more than, even as much as, one glass straight, but they are satisfactory in combination, as here. Besides peach there are apricot, redcurrant, damson and cherry versions, so that even quite stupid and unimaginative careful men will not find much difficulty in improvising variations on the theme I have provided.

Jo Bartley’s Christmas Punch 3 bottles dry or medium-dry white wine

2 bottles gin

1 bottle brandy

1 bottle sherry

1 bottle dry vermouth

5 quarts medium-sweet cider

Ice cubes

(If you feel like throwing in the unfinished drinks from last night, nobody will notice.) Mix everything together and serve from jugs that have some ice in them. Remember G.P. 4 and cut all the corners you can: Spanish wine, cocktail gin, non-cognac (but not non-French) brandy, British sherry and British vermouth; the cider will cover them and blend them into a new and splendid whole. Despite the potency that lurks behind its seeming mildness, I have never known anybody to suffer while or after drinking it.

I have named it after its creator, the scholar, wit and dear friend of mine who died in 1967.

Paul Fussell’s Milk Punch

1 part brandy

1 part bourbon whiskey

4 parts fresh milk

Nutmeg

Frozen milk cubes

The previous evening (this is the hardest part) put milk instead of water into enough ice-trays in your refrigerator. On the day, mix the fresh milk and the spirits thoroughly together—in an electric blender, the deviser of the recipe says, and by all means do that if there is one lying about and not wanted by someone else and clean and with no bits missing and in working order. For me, stirring in a jug will do just as well. Pour into biggish glasses, drop in milk cubes, dust with nutmeg and serve.

This punch is to be drunk immediately on rising, in lieu of eating breakfast. It is an excellent heartener and sustainer at the outset of a hard day: not only before an air trip or an interview, but when you have in prospect one of those gruelling nominal festivities like Christmas morning, the wedding of an old friend of your wife’s or taking the family over to Gran’s for Sunday dinner.

Note. Do not, of course, use an expensive bourbon or a brandy that is anything more than just French. And taste each bottle of milk before pouring it in. There is a risk that sour-milk punch would not be as good.

Reginald Bosanquet’s Golden Elixir

Champagne

Fresh peaches

The proportion is three biggish or four smallish peaches to one bottle; it is not critical. Put the stoned fruit through an electric blender—I hate the things, but I cannot think of a manual method that will do the job effectively. Pour the chilled champagne into wine glasses and top up with the strained peach-juice. “The best drink in the world,” says its creator with conviction. Very good, to be sure—and healthy.

Jittersauce

1 part Scotch

1 part gin

2 parts champagne

Ice cubes

Mix the Scotch and the gin, add ice, stir, pour champagne on top. This smooth-tasting drink, Robert Conquest tells me, was popular in some circles at Oxford in the late Thirties. It is a translation into action of the words of Cab Calloway, who at that time was in the habit of singing:

If you want to be a jitterbug,

First thing you do is git a mug;

Pour whisky, gin