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Pineapple Punch
Take a sound, ripe, well-flavoured pineapple, pare it, pick out the specks, and cut it into thin slices. Weigh the pulp, and put half a pound of it into a bowl. Boil a quarter of a pound of best Carolina rice in a quart of cold water, with two inches of stick cinnamon, and a salt-spoonful of green nutmeg. When the rice is soft, strain the water, and put it aside for a short time. Rub a few lumps of sugar upon the rind of eight fresh lemons, add more sugar to make up a pound and a half, and put this and the strained juice of the lemons with the pineapple. Pour in three pints of boiling water, and then with two jugs--one in each hand--pour the liquid backwards and forwards from a good height, and continue this for twenty minutes. Add gradually half a bottle of French brandy, half a bottle of Madeira, and a bottle and a half of rum, and whilst the spirits and wine are being added keep on pouring the liquid from one jug to another for fully three-quarters of an hour, by which time the punch will be delicately flavoured. Last of all, add the seasoned rice-water, stir it quickly into the punch, pour the preparation into a bowl with a closely-fitting lid, throw a cloth over this, and leave it in a cool place for eight hours. Strain through a jelly-bag, until the punch is quite bright, then bottle it, and cork securely. Pineapple punch improves with keeping. Sufficient for about a gallon of punch.
A large-format Victorian punch, built on an oleo-saccharum and clarified with rice water rather than milk. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are for a party and the process is long.
- Bottle sizesA Victorian wine or spirit bottle held roughly the modern 750 ml. Read the spirits as about 375 ml brandy, 375 ml Madeira and 1.1 litres of rum — roughly two litres of alcohol in a gallon of punch. This is a strong drink; serve it in small glasses, diluted with ice or soda if you like.
- Weights and small measuresHalf a pound of pineapple pulp is 225 g, the rice 115 g, the sugar 675 g total including the lumps rubbed on the lemons. A salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon. A quart is 40 imperial fl oz, near enough 1.1 litres.
- The sugar and lemon stepRubbing lump sugar over the lemon zest, then adding the rest of the sugar, is an oleo-saccharum: the sugar draws the citrus oil out of the peel. It is a major part of the punch's perfume, alongside the spices and the pineapple, so it is worth doing rather than relying on juice alone. Peeling the zest thinly and leaving it muddled into the sugar for an hour or more does much the same job.
- Carolina riceA long-grain white rice, the standard fine rice of the period. Any plain long-grain rice works; the point is the starchy cooking water, not the grain, which is discarded.
- Green nutmegProbably nutmeg in sound condition and freshly grated rather than stale ready-ground powder, though the term is not certain and may point to fresh or immature nutmeg. Grate a quarter teaspoon from a whole nutmeg.
- The pouringTwenty minutes and then three-quarters of an hour of pouring between jugs is aeration and dissolution, not ritual. A whisk, or ten minutes of pouring from a height, dissolves the sugar and marries the spirits perfectly well. Do it over a wide bowl and expect splashes.
- Rice water and clarificationThe starchy water is added last, the punch rests eight hours and is then strained until bright; the intention is evidently to carry haze and pineapple solids out with the sediment, as milk does in a milk punch, though the mechanism is not the same. Use a jelly bag, a doubled muslin or a paper coffee filter, and do not squeeze it or the punch will go cloudy again.
- Keeping and yieldA gallon, imperial, is about 4.5 litres — some forty small servings. The alcohol and sugar make it stable; bottle it, cork it and keep it cool and dark, and the claim that it improves with age is reasonable for a spirit-heavy punch.
Punch reached Britain from the East India trade, and the name is generally traced to the Hindi pānch, five, for the classic set of spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice — all five are present here, with the pineapple and the fortified wine as luxuries on top. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, punch was already a slightly old-fashioned, ceremonial drink, made in quantity for a house full of guests rather than by the glass. The clarification with rice water is a thrifty cousin of clarified milk punch, a technique English households had used since the eighteenth century to make a fruit-and-spirit mixture keep and pour bright; the eight-hour rest and the jelly bag are doing the work that a fining agent does in wine. Pineapple itself signalled expense — grown under glass in English hothouses or shipped from the West Indies — and pairing it with rum quietly acknowledges where both the fruit and the spirit came from.