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Imperial Punch, Cold
Cut a pineapple into very thin slices, and slice also four closely-peeled China oranges, leaving none of the white pith attached to the orange-slices. Put the slices into a bowl. Extract the flavour from an inch length of vanilla, and about half an inch of stick cinnamon, by heating them in a quart of water with the peel of a Seville orange. Rub off the rind of lemon on a lump or two of sugar, and squeeze the juice from four lemons into the bowl, adding the sugar with more lemon-juice to make half a pound, then strain in the vanilla liquid, and cover to get cold. When quite cold, mix a bottle each of rum, hock, and champagne, with a pint of seltzer water. Stir well, and serve in champagne glasses, cold.
A Victorian party bowl scaled for a crowd: three bottles of alcohol plus a quart of infusion means roughly five litres of finished punch, or about thirty small glasses. A few of the ingredients need translating before you start.
- HockAn English name for white Rhine wine, the name usually traced to Hochheim; it ranged from dry to distinctly sweet. A dry or off-dry German Riesling is the closest substitute; anything oaky will fight the vanilla.
- China orangesThe ordinary sweet orange, so called because the sweet variety reached Europe by way of China. Four navel or Valencia oranges will do. The Seville orange supplying the peel is the bitter marmalade orange, in season only in midwinter; bitter orange peel sold dried for cocktails covers the same ground.
- The half-pound of sugarThe sentence is genuinely ambiguous. The most natural reading is that the sugar totals half a pound (about 1 cup granulated, including the lumps rubbed on the lemon), with lemon juice added to balance it. Sweeten to taste at the end rather than committing all of it early.
- Rubbing off the rindDragging a sugar lump across a lemon until it is stained yellow strips the oil-bearing outer zest. A modern equivalent is to muddle the pared zest of two lemons into the sugar and let it sit half an hour, which is the same principle as an oleo-saccharum.
- The infusionA quart of water is simmered with an inch of vanilla pod (split it), half an inch of cinnamon stick and the Seville peel. Keep it below a hard boil and give it ten to fifteen minutes; longer draws bitterness out of the cinnamon. Strain through a fine sieve or muslin.
- Make it the day beforeThe fruit, sugar, lemon juice and strained infusion should be thoroughly cold before the wine goes in. Chilling overnight lets the pineapple and orange give up their juice and keeps the champagne from going flat on contact.
- Order of adding fizzRum and hock can be mixed in advance. Add the champagne and seltzer at the last moment, straight from the refrigerator, and stir once rather than beating it.
- IceThe recipe adds no ice to the bowl at all; it simply says to serve cold. If you use ice, use a single large block so the punch is not watered down as it stands.
- StrengthWith three bottles against roughly a quart of infusion and a pint of seltzer, the finished bowl lands somewhere near the strength of wine; the small champagne glass is doing real work.
Punch of this kind sat at the top end of the Victorian drinks repertoire, where the name "imperial" signalled expense rather than any fixed formula — pineapple, champagne and vanilla were all luxury goods, and a recipe calling for three full bottles at once was a statement about the household as much as about the drink. Cassell's dictionary appeared in the 1870s and was reissued for decades afterwards, aimed at a middle-class readership keen to entertain in the manner of their betters, which is why the book carries punches, cups and cobblers alongside plain boiled mutton. The structure here is the old one: spirit, citrus, sugar, spice and a diluent, a template generally traced to English sailors and merchants in seventeenth-century India, with the wine and seltzer standing in for the water of the earlier bowls. The vanilla and cinnamon infusion draws the flavour into a syrup rather than leaving it floating in the glass.