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Champagne Cup
Pour a bottle of champagne into a silver or glass bowl, large enough to hold three quarts. Add to this two bottles of soda or seltzer water, a table-spoonful of brandy, and one pound of crushed ice. Stir it well with a silver spoon, and add, last of all, a table-spoonful of finely-sifted sugar. Be careful, when putting in the sugar, that the wine does not overflow. A little cucumber-rind is by some persons considered an improvement. Time, a few minutes. Sufficient for a party of nine or ten.
A late-Victorian summer cup, built in the bowl rather than shaken, and unusually restrained for its era — one spoonful each of brandy and sugar for a whole bottle of champagne.
- The hinge: add the sugar last, and slowlySugar crystals dropped into a carbonated liquid give it a surface to nucleate on, and the bowl foams over. Sift it fine, scatter it across the top, and stir gently with the spoon already in the bowl.
- Bottle sizesA champagne bottle of the period was in the region of 750 ml, close to the modern standard. Victorian soda and seltzer bottles were smaller, commonly around 10-12 oz, so two bottles is roughly 600-700 ml -- about two and a half to three cups of soda water to one bottle of wine. Add it to taste rather than by count.
- Soda versus seltzerSeltzer took its name from the Selters spring and now means simply carbonated water; nineteenth-century soda water often carried a little sodium bicarbonate, which softens the acidity. Either works, but avoid modern club soda's added minerals if you want the cleaner version.
- A pound of crushed iceAbout two to three cups. It is there to chill and dilute at once, which is why the recipe tolerates so much soda. Chill the champagne and the mixers hard beforehand so the ice melts slowly.
- Cucumber rindUse long peeled strips from an unwaxed cucumber, green side only, and pull them out after five to ten minutes. Left in, they turn the cup vegetal and slightly bitter.
- YieldThe recipe specifies a bowl large enough to hold three quarts; the ingredients as written fill rather less. The book puts it at nine or ten servings. Serve at once in stemmed glasses.
The "cup" is a distinct Victorian category, separate from punch: a large, lightly alcoholic, iced and aerated drink served from a bowl at garden parties, cricket matches, race meetings and balls, where punch would have been too strong for the afternoon. Claret cup and cider cup were the everyday versions; champagne cup was the expensive one, and the fact that Cassell's includes it says something about the aspirational middle-class readership of the household dictionaries of the 1870s and 80s. The cucumber rind is a signature of the whole family of cups — it appears in Borage's place in many nineteenth-century recipes and survives today in the Pimm's jug, and it is generally said to have been valued for the cool green smell rather than any flavour of its own. Diluting good champagne with soda water strikes a modern drinker as wasteful, though sweetness levels varied a good deal in the period, the English market taking the driest wines.