We don’t know what these arty partiers, these ’80s-era swells, were imbibing at the MIA—or why. These days, there needn’t be an occasion: the MIA sells beer and wine in its restaurants; happy hour begins at 2:30 p.m. But for a long time there wasn’t any alcohol at the MIA, and there wasn’t supposed to be any outside of it, either.
During the nearly 14 years of Prohibition, curators worried that the tankards, mugs, and punch bowls on display had lost their Dionysian appeal. “Memories, for those of us who are old enough to have them, are stirred by the great silver punch bowl in the Queen Anne Room,” mused the MIA in its Bulletin in 1932. “Nowadays those who possess such bowls use them for flowers or great mountains of fruit, but there was a time when they served a nobler purpose.” Not exactly how prohibitionists would have described it.
In the same cheeky issue, the museum published a recipe from a brandy merchant famed in Queen Anne’s day for his delicious punch: Mix a quart of brandy with two quarts of water, six or eight Lisbon lemons, and half a pound of loaf sugar. That’s it. It was called Major Bird’s punch recipe, and was ostensibly included in the magazine as just “an interesting bit of research into the hospitable customs of our ancestors.” Right. Now we’ve done the same.
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