The Widow Ranter
The process of making Clarified Milk Punch (or often English Milk Punch) is the drunk cousin of cheese-making. So aside from going down the deep and fascinating history of cheese-making, the earliest “versions” of curdled milk desserts date back to the 16th Century. The similar curdling techniques and process found in making medieval Irish scailtin, or Cornish syllabub, or posset originating in Great Britain are what we use to clarify our cocktails with milk.
When Kevin and I started this Clarified Milk Punch venture, we wanted to learn as much as we could to represent it best. Our name was very important to us.
This is Aphra Behn,
(Dec 14,1640 - Apr 16, 1689)
The English spy, poet, playwright, philosopher, translator, and novelist who put English Milk Punch on a stage. In her tragicomic, The Widow Ranter: The History of Bacon in Virginia, (not that bacon) her leading character mimics the queen and declares:
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And that’s where Regalia Punch Co started.
What we’ve learned about Aphra Behn feels revolutionary, only to remember the era she belonged to. As one of the first English women to earn a living writing, she hurdled societal barriers and opened future opportunities for later generations. The publication of The Widow Ranter happened after her death was marked as one of the first British plays set in Colonial America, written by a woman, and written by someone who had physically traveled to the Americas.
She is not only acclaimed for her bounds as a female professional, but her progressiveness led to works like Oroonoko, a story of an African prince and his false enslavement, sale, and slavery to European colonists, and his fight, love, and rebellion.
She is praised by later female authors like Virginia Woolf in her feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, for creating the space where women can excel.
She was criticized for her “radical” themes of gender, sexuality and fluidity, and pleasure. Later tokened as an instrumental reference point of changing modern thought.
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Our Clarified Milk Punch herstory continues with the first written record of a recipe. Found in 1914, within the tattered remains of a hand-written cookbook manuscript, the first documented recipe (shown below) was penned by a woman named Mary Rockett in 1711.
Her original recipe was adapted by Benjamin Franklin and found in his wine cellar with bottles of Clarified Milk Punch.
