Oxford Punch

A late-Georgian punch that survived into the Victorian cookery dictionaries largely unchanged. Two of its ingredients are no longer sold, and the whole thing is built around a step that is easy to skip and shouldn't be.

• Start with the sugar and rindRubbing lump sugar over the lemon peel until the sugar is stained yellow is the hinge of the recipe: it draws the peel oil into the sugar (the oleo-saccharum) and gives the punch its perfume. Zesting into granulated sugar and letting it stand an hour achieves the same thing; skipping it leaves a punch that tastes only of juice and spirit.
• Loaf sugarHalf a pound of loaf sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated. Loaf sugar came as a hard cone broken into lumps, which is why the recipe specifies lumps for rubbing.
• Seville orangesBitter marmalade oranges, in season only in midwinter and rarely stocked otherwise. They are sour and aromatic rather than sweet; a workable stand-in is roughly two parts sweet orange juice to one part lemon or lime juice, with a strip of sweet orange peel for the rind.
• Calf's foot jellyA pint of jelly stock made by long-boiling calves' feet, used here for body and mouthfeel rather than flavour; the versions sold and made for the table were often sweetened and flavoured as well. A pint of water with a couple of teaspoons of powdered gelatine dissolved in it stands in for it, or leave it out and accept a thinner punch.
• CapillaireA sugar syrup infused with maidenhair fern and orange-flower water, once sold by the bottle and now gone from the trade. Substitute a heavy simple syrup scented with a few drops of orange-flower water; a bottle here is probably something on the order of a pint, and an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 cups -- the punch will be sweet.
• Orange shrubNot a modern vinegar shrub. In this period orange shrub was rum or brandy sweetened and flavoured with citrus juice and peel, closer to a liqueur. A quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups, making it the largest single addition by volume, though being sweetened and diluted it is weaker than the brandy or rum; an orange curacao cut with a little rum and lemon juice is the nearest thing on a shelf today.
• On the hobTwenty minutes on the hob means held hot beside the fire, not boiled. Keep it below a simmer so the peel infuses without turning bitter, and let it cool before the spirits go in, or the alcohol and the orange-flower water will both go up the chimney.
• Imperial measures and yieldThe pints and quarts are imperial: a pint is 20 fl oz, a quart 40. The recipe reckons it at nearly a gallon, which would be enough for twenty-five to thirty small cups, and the proportion of spirit to liquid puts it somewhere around the strength of a table wine. It scales down cleanly by halves or quarters.