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Punch in Haste
Rub the rind of a fresh lemon with a large lump of sugar till the yellow part is taken off. Crush it to powder, with a quarter of an ounce of citric acid, and pour over it a pint of clarified syrup. Put a table-spoonful of this flavoured syrup into a pint of water, add a glassful of rum or a glassful of brandy, or a mixture of both, and serve.
A shortcut punch built on a bottled flavouring syrup rather than fresh juice, so that a drink can be assembled at a moment's notice. The syrup is the whole point of the recipe; the mixing at the end is trivial.
- Start with the oleo-saccharumRubbing a lump of sugar over the lemon until it is stained yellow pulls the peel oil into the sugar, and that oil is what carries the aroma. Stop at the yellow zest; any white pith rubbed off turns the syrup bitter.
- Clarified syrupIn Victorian usage this generally means a sugar syrup boiled and skimmed (sometimes clarified with beaten egg white) until perfectly clear. Proportions vary from book to book, but it is a heavy syrup; a modern rich simple syrup of roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight is a reasonable stand-in.
- Citric acidA quarter of an ounce is about 7 g, food-grade citric acid of the sort sold for preserving or brewing. It stands in for the sharpness of lemon juice, which would not keep as well in a stored syrup; the flavour is flatter than fresh juice.
- PintsCassell's is British, so a pint here is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not the American 16.
- "A glassful"Genuinely imprecise. In period drink writing a glass of spirit usually means a wine glass, somewhere between 2 and 2.5 fl oz; the recipe gives no way to be certain, so treat it as a starting point and taste.
- Proportions and yieldOne tablespoon of syrup to a pint of water is a light hand — the drink is meant to be long and refreshing rather than sweet. As written it makes roughly two generous tumblers; scale the water and spirit together and keep the syrup separate for later batches.
- ServingNothing here needs heat. Chill the water, or build over ice, and add a strip of lemon peel if you want the aroma back in the glass.
Punch reached Britain through the East India trade in the seventeenth century, and by the time Cassell's was compiled it had settled into a domestic ritual: spirit, citrus, sugar, water, spice, mixed in a bowl for company. What is interesting about this entry is the word haste. Rather than a bowl assembled on the spot, it offers a bottled concentrate — peel oil and citric acid suspended in syrup — so a household could produce a creditable punch without a lemon in the house. Citric acid was available to Victorian kitchens, and cookery books of the period use it freely as a keeping substitute for fresh juice in lemonades, sherbets and effervescing draughts. The recipe reads as a method more than a formula: make the flavouring once, dilute it as required.