Home › The Principles of Cookery › Roman Punch, Iced
Roman Punch, Iced
Put two pounds of finely-powdered sugar into a bowl, and strain over it the juice of ten lemons and two sweet oranges. Add the thin rind of a lemon and an orange, and let the infusion remain for one hour. Strain the syrup through muslin, add gradually the whites of ten eggs beaten to a firm froth, and freeze the punch in the usual way being careful to work it vigorously with the spattle while it is being frozen. A few minutes before serving, mix together a pint of old white Jamaica rum, half a pint of green tea half a pint of brandy, and a bottle of champagne. Add the ice, and stir briskly till it dissolves. A pint of pineapple syrup may be added or not. This punch should be thick and creamy in appearance. If it is too thick to be poured into glasses, it should be thinned with a little more champagne. Iced Roman punch should be handed round in high glasses between the roast and the game courses.
This is a frozen sorbet-punch built on ten raw egg whites that are never heated at any stage, which is where the recipe fails for a modern table.
- The raw whites are the problemTen whites are whisked into cold syrup and churned; nothing in the method takes them above freezing. Raw egg white carries a real risk of Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it. Modern recipes for an egg-white sorbet or punch generally call for pasteurised whites or a cooked Italian meringue, and one of those should be used instead.
- The alcohol does not sterilise itIt is sometimes assumed that a pint of rum, half a pint of brandy and a bottle of champagne make the mixture safe. They do not: the spirits go in at the very end, the whites are already frozen into the ice, and the finished punch is nowhere near a concentration or a contact time that would matter.
- Served to everyone at the tableA mid-dinner punch was handed round to the whole company, which may include elderly guests and anyone pregnant or unwell — precisely the people for whom raw egg is least advisable. Scale compounds it: ten eggs into one bowl means a single contaminated egg spoils the lot.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The book assumes a freezing pot packed in ice and salt, worked constantly by hand with a spattle — a flat paddle for scraping the frozen shell off the sides. The instruction is a churning direction, not a food-safety step, and it does no heating whatsoever.
- Green tea in a punchThe half-pint of green tea is not a flavouring accident: brewed tea supplied tannin and body to nineteenth-century punches. It is one of the few elements here that would translate straight into a modern version.
- QuantitiesTwo pounds of sugar, ten lemons, two oranges and close to three pints of spirits and wine make a very large punch — a service for a formal dinner, not a domestic dessert.
A punch served frozen partway through dinner was a fixture of grand nineteenth-century menus, and the placement of it — "between the roast and the game courses" — is the whole point of the dish. The mid-meal ice was meant to settle the stomach and refresh the palate before the heavier courses resumed, a role the French called the coup du milieu and, when frozen, the sorbet course. The link between the name and the city of Rome is traditional rather than documented; the rum, brandy and champagne are thoroughly of the London and Paris dining room. Iced Roman punch travelled well: it turns up repeatedly on American state dinner menus of the later 1800s, where its arrival mid-meal marked a dinner as ambitious. The egg white, whipped in before churning, is what gives the "thick and creamy" texture the recipe insists on — it keeps the ice smooth and stops it setting to a solid block, broadly the job that gelatine or invert sugar does in a modern sorbet.