Gather ’round the punch bowl

Punch is a drink of celebration. Its very presentation brings people close: Guests gather around the sacred pool of the punch bowl, extend their cups and — assuming you’ve mixed it well — plead Dickensianly for more.

Punch is for people you want to spend time with. If you’re trying to avoid your family this holiday, don’t make punch! You’ll have no excuse to escape while they unwrap the cheese ball and talk about your aunt’s bursitis. If you want to dodge your guests, make cocktails, which require rising above the hullabaloo enough to focus on ingredients, measurements and not zesting your knuckle into someone’s martini.

Punch’s resurgence owes a lot to author David Wondrich, who followed up his award-winning “Imbibe!” with the copiously researched and occasionally hilarious “Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl.” Punch “was unquestionably the first popular mixed drink based on spirits,” he says. “It was the introduction of spirits into polite drinking society — although sometimes it was pretty impolite.”

Little wonder: Wondrich’s research indicates the drink most likely came ashore with English and Dutch sailors returning from their exploits in various colonies around the early 1600s. There’s a whiff of piracy in punch, and the citrus that’s key in so many classic recipes probably was originally a means of warding off scurvy.

That was back in the early days of distilling, and many of the refined, delicious spirits we now enjoy were coarse, proto-versions of their current selves. The addition of sugar and citrus to make punch not only made spirits palatable, Wondrich says, “it made something delicious.”

Dan Searing, a partner at Room 11 in D.C. and author of “The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry,” says he loves the conviviality of punch, which “was very much a part of drinking life in the 18th century and before.” A return to that collective feeling, Searing says, is part of the reason behind the motto for his Punch Club pop-up: It was “Gaudium Omnibus,” Latin for “Joy to All.”

There are old rules governing the ratio of citrus to sugar to water to booze, but everyone seems to have followed a different set of them. Just keep in mind that balance and dilution are key. Made by the old tenets, Wondrich says, a punch should have about the alcohol content of sherry: roughly 16 to 22 percent. Common mistakes? Too much spice. “People see that word, ‘spice,’ and it gets their inner mixologist going, and they’re, like, ‘I can infuse my gin with chamomile, and blah blah blah.’ And that’s fine for a cocktail. You’ve got your six to eight sips, and it’s gone. But with punch, you’re supposed to drink that all night, and it gets very tiresome.”

That said, both Searing and Gina Chersevani of Hank’s on the Hill and Buffalo & Bergen in D.C. say they like punch’s flexibility.

“It’s the ever-flowing bowl,” Chersevani says. “The party isn’t over till the punch bowl is empty, and if you’re almost empty, you can always add an ingredient to keep it going. … It can evolve over the course of the evening as you change the flavors.”