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Orange Punch
Dissolve a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar in a pint of boiling water. Add the strained juice of a small lemon, a quarter of a pint of brandy, a quarter of a pint of orange wine, a quarter of a pint of rum, and, if liked, a glassful of maraschino or Curacoa. The punch may be taken either hot or cold, and if bottled and corked closely will keep for some time. A quarter of a pint of calf's foot jelly will greatly improve it. Time, a few minutes to dissolve the sugar. Sufficient for three pints of punch.
A Victorian punch built on a hot sugar syrup rather than a shaken cocktail, and designed to be made in quantity and bottled. Most of the work is in sourcing the two dated ingredients.
- Imperial measuresThe book's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz or roughly 140 ml — a generous half cup by US measure, not the 4 oz an American quarter-pint would give. A quarter pound of loaf sugar is about 115 g, or a little over half a cup granulated.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar was sold in hard cones to be broken up with sugar nippers; it is simply white sugar. Granulated dissolves faster in the boiling water and behaves identically here.
- Orange wineA homemade country wine fermented from oranges, common in Victorian stillrooms and effectively unobtainable now. An orange muscat, or a dry white wine with the juice and pared zest of an orange steeped in it, gives the nearest result; a splash of an orange aperitif wine also works.
- Curacoa and maraschinoCuracoa is curacao, the bitter-orange liqueur — the clear or white bottling, not the blue. Maraschino means the liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their stones, not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
- Calf's foot jellyA gelatin set from simmered calf's feet — the plain stock is unflavoured, though Victorian calf's foot jelly was often finished with sugar, lemon and wine — and a familiar invalid food of the period. Its contribution here is body and a faint richness on the tongue; if you cannot be bothered, leave it out rather than substituting a flavoured jelly. Powdered gelatin bloomed and stirred into the hot syrup approximates the effect.
- Keeping itThe recipe does not say whether the jelly goes into the bottled punch. Spirits and sugar at this strength are reasonably self-preserving, but gelatin is a protein, so the safer reading is to bottle the plain punch, refrigerate it, and add the jelly only to the portion you are about to serve.
- Where the orange comes fromThere is no orange juice in the list. The name rests on the orange wine, with the curacao — which the recipe marks as optional, and as an alternative to maraschino — reinforcing it. Lemon juice is doing the acid work alone.
- YieldThree imperial pints is a little over 1.7 litres. The ingredients as listed come to under two pints, so the stated yield implies further dilution; undiluted the mixture sits at roughly table-wine strength, and weaker again if made up to three pints. In punch cups of 4 to 5 fl oz that is a dozen or more servings.
Punch reached Britain through East India Company shipping in the seventeenth century, and the name is generally traced to the Hindi panch, five, for the canonical five parts: spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice, though the derivation is not certain. By the time Cassell's was compiled, punch was as much a domestic drink as a tavern one — made by the jug for evening parties, served hot in winter and cold in summer, and sometimes stretched with a home-fermented fruit wine. The suggestion of calf's foot jelly places the drink in the Victorian borderland between refreshment and restorative: gelatin from simmered feet was standard nourishment for invalids.