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Wine Punch
Take two lemons, and rasp the yellow rind off with half a pound of loaf sugar. Put this with the juice of the lemons into a bowl; then make scalding hot two bottles of good Rhine wine, adding to it a pint of strong green tea. Pour this over the sugar, and add from half a pint to a pint of arrack or fine rum.
A hot German-style wine punch built on the old confectioner's trick of rubbing sugar against citrus peel to capture the oil. The whole character of the drink comes from that step and from keeping the wine below a boil.
- Rasping the sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard cone or block, and rubbing it over a lemon stripped the zest and soaked up the oil in one motion. With modern sugar, zest the two lemons finely and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers until damp and fragrant, or use a few sugar cubes rubbed hard over the whole fruit.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is a generous cup of granulated sugar, about 1 1/8 cups, for two bottles of wine. It reads sweet to current taste; a third to a half of it makes a drier punch without unbalancing the citrus.
- Rhine wineA dry to off-dry German Riesling or Silvaner is the direct equivalent. Avoid anything oaked or high in alcohol; the point is a light, acidic white that will carry the lemon.
- Scalding hot, not boilingThis is the hinge. Heat the wine to roughly 160-175F, when steam rises and the surface trembles. A boil drives off the alcohol and turns the wine flat and stewed.
- The green teaA pint is 2 cups by American measure, closer to 2 1/2 if the book is using the English pint. "Strong" here means a proper infusion, but green tea brewed with boiling water for a long steep goes harshly bitter. Water at about 175F for three minutes, using roughly double the usual leaf, gives strength without tannic rasp.
- ArrackA spirit distilled in South and Southeast Asia from palm sap or fermented rice and molasses, and a standard punch base in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Batavia arrack is still made and is the closest thing; the recipe's own alternative, a fine rum, works.
- Order of assemblyAdd the spirit off the heat, after the hot wine and tea have gone over the sugar. Adding it to the pan wastes alcohol and aroma.
- YieldTwo bottles of wine plus tea and spirit make roughly 2.25 to 2.5 litres, or twelve to sixteen punch-cup servings. Serve in warmed glasses or cups with a handle.
Punch reached Europe through English trade with India in the seventeenth century, and arrack was its usual early spirit; the word is traditionally derived from a Hindi word for five, for five ingredients, though that derivation is disputed and other authorities trace it to "puncheon". By the nineteenth century hot Punsch made with Rhine wine, tea and arrack was familiar winter and Christmas fare in Germany. The rasping of sugar against citrus is older still, a confectioner's method for lifting the peel oil that survives today in the oleo-saccharum of revived punch recipes. Green tea appears in a good many punch recipes of the period.