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Sherbet, for Punch
The quality of punch depends in a great measure upon the way the sherbet is mixed. The different flavouring ingredients ought to be blended thoroughly before the spirit or wine is put in, and unless this is done the punch will lose in delicacy of flavour. The quantity of wine and spirit used will, of course, vary according to taste. Generally two lemons and half a pound of sugar will be sufficient for four quarts of punch. To make the sherbet, rub half a pound of fine sugar in lumps upon two large fresh lemons until all the yellow part is taken off. Remove the white bitter skin of the lemons, throw away the pips, and cut the pulp into slices with a silver knife. Put these upon the sugar, and bruise all well together with a wooden spoon. If the lemons are very acid, a little of the juice may be set aside. When the pulp and sugar are well rubbed together, pour a little boiling water over them, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Let the syrup cool, strain it, and add wine and spirit till the punch is of the requisite strength. Sometimes the rind and juice of a Seville orange are used to make the sherbet, as well as two lemons.
This is a punch base rather than a finished drink: an oleo-saccharum, or oil-sugar, made by abrading citrus zest into sugar. Nothing here has dated except the vocabulary and the vessels.
- What "sherbet" means hereNot frozen anything. In nineteenth-century punch-making the sherbet is the sweet, aromatic non-alcoholic base — citrus, sugar and water — into which wine and spirit are later stirred. The word reached English through Turkish serbet and Persian sharbat, from an Arabic root meaning to drink.
- The hinge: extract the oil, not the juiceRubbing the lump sugar against the whole lemon draws the aromatic oil out of the peel and into the sugar. That oil, not the juice, is what gives good punch its perfume. Take only the yellow zest and stop before you reach the white pith, which is bitter.
- Lump sugar and the modern substituteOld-fashioned loaf or lump sugar had a hard, abrasive face useful for grating against peel. A cube sugar works the same way; failing that, use a peeler to take the zest off in strips, then muddle it into 8 oz of caster or granulated sugar and leave it an hour to draw.
- The silver knifeCarbon steel blades of the period discoloured on contact with acid and left a metallic taste. Any stainless or ceramic blade solves this now.
- How much boiling waterThe original says only "a little," which is genuinely open. Enough to dissolve the sugar is all that is required, and no more, since the wine and spirit make up the bulk of the four quarts; adjust to your own dilution.
- Cool before the spirit goes inAdding wine or spirit to hot syrup drives off both the alcohol and the volatile citrus oils you just spent ten minutes extracting. Let it come to room temperature or below.
- Seville orangesThe bitter Seville is a seasonal fruit, roughly January to March in most markets, and is not the supermarket orange. Its rind is markedly more aromatic and its juice sharp; a mixture of ordinary orange juice with extra lemon is a rough stand-in, but the rind is not really replaceable.
- Yield and strengthAs written the base serves four quarts of finished punch — around sixteen to twenty cups. The book deliberately leaves the wine-to-spirit ratio to the maker; build it up gradually and taste as you go.
Punch reached Britain through the East India trade in the seventeenth century, and by the time Cassell's was compiled the drink was often described as following a grammar of five parts: spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice. The entry teaches the one operation that separates good punch from bad — the oleo-saccharum, the sugar-and-oil base. That the compiler bothers to specify a silver knife, wooden spoon and thorough blending before any spirit appears tells you how seriously a large Victorian household took its punch bowl, which was a communal object brought out for company. Seville oranges appear as an alternative because they were the standard bitter citrus of the British kitchen, arriving in winter and going mostly into marmalade.