Punch alla livornese

Punch alla livornese is a traditional drink of the city of Livorno , it is drunk in the bars of the city and it is well known that it is good for everyone and everything. Punch is drunk if you are sad, if you are happy, if you have a cold, cough or other ailments, for a job promotion, for a blow to life, for lunch, snack and dinner.

Punch is an alcoholic drink born in Livorno between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and derives from the English punch, it is a reinterpretation of it, and it was spread in the city from a mixture with the British community and its culture. In Livorno, a port city, yes, there were also the English who were always a little everywhere with their habits. They made punch and it was different from punch: in their drink there was tea, the English are known without tea are not English , then there was sugar, cinnamon, lemon and brandy (or boiling water, lemon juice, Antillean rum, nutmeg spirit and arak, a rice wine distillate originating from Indonesia).

In Livorno , where they used tea to rinse the dishes, they didn't want to hear about this ingredient, the English drank tea, the Livorno punch had another basic ingredient: concentrated coffee and then, instead of rum from the Antilles, a little too sophisticated and irreconcilable with the flavor of coffee, they used the fancy rum also known as “ rumme ”, a local invention consisting of alcohol, sugar and dark caramel. Also included was the lemon peel , called the sail , on which there are stories and legends, the most plausible is that an innkeeper of the many rubbed the glasses for punch with a slice of lemon to wash them, thus leaving a certain “Not-so-that” that mixed with the taste of coffee and rum . The lemon peel was called the sail because Livorno is a seaside city, someone saw the sails, the lemon slice reminded them and voilà , since then a tradition began.

The famous version of the punch between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved boiling the ground coffee in a pot full of water; from this an infusion was obtained which was filtered with a woolen cloth and placed in the coffee pot. Rumme or mastic (a version of mistrà, a green aniseed liqueur) was then added to the coffee that came out of the machine.
Until the early twentieth century rumme and mastic were manufactured by the owner of the place himself.

In this version the punch disappeared in the 1950s, it remained in the city anyway but with some variations.

Since in Livorno if you make the punch you do well, the Leghorns have created variants for all tastes because one seemed few and therefore in the city you can find:

The "half and a half" punch made from half a traditional recipe based on rum and half a glass of aniseed liqueur, called pebble.

The “cognacche” punch : a drop of cognac is added to the classic recipe to give a more decisive flavor to the rum.

Punch "torpedine ": the spicy version of punch, which is prepared by adding a pinch of chilli pepper to the coffee powder.



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