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Yorkshire Punch
Rub some large lumps of sugar upon four lemons and one Seville orange until all the yellow part is taken off. Weigh the sugar, and add as much more as will make up its weight to a pound and a quarter. Put the sugar into a bowl, and strain over it the juice of six lemons and three Seville oranges. Add a pint of liquid calf's foot jelly, and stir in gradually two quarts of boiling water. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and put the bowl containing them by the side of the fire for twenty minutes. Strain the mixture, put with it a bottle of orange or lemon shrub, and add half a pint of rum and half a pint of brandy. If the trouble of rubbing the sugar upon the lemons and orange is objected to, the sugar may be rubbed upon a portion of the lemon, and the thin rind of the rest soaked in the jelly and the strained juice until the flavour is extracted. The flavour of the punch thus made will not quite equal that made by rubbing the sugar on the lemon.
A large-format hot punch built on an oleo-saccharum, thickened and given body with calf's foot jelly. Nothing in it is difficult, but three of the ingredients need translating before you shop.
- The hinge: rub the sugar, don't zest itDragging sugar lumps over the fruit until the yellow is gone draws out the peel oils into the sugar — an oleo-saccharum — and that oil is the whole flavour of the drink. The book's own fallback (steeping thin-cut rind in the juice and jelly) is offered with the honest warning that it is inferior; it is, noticeably.
- Sugar quantityA pound and a quarter in total: the rubbed sugar is weighed and then made up to that weight. That is roughly 2 3/4 to 3 cups of granulated. Lump sugar is the tool here rather than an ingredient in itself, so ordinary sugar cubes work; the weight is what matters.
- Calf's foot jellyHomemade unflavoured gelatin stock, simmered from split calves' feet and clarified. It contributes body and a faint richness, not flavour. Unflavoured powdered gelatin dissolved in a pint of water gives a comparable texture, and leaving it out entirely gives a thinner but perfectly good punch.
- ShrubIn this period, shrub means a sweetened citrus-and-spirit cordial (usually rum-based), not the vinegar drinking-shrub sold today. A bottle is roughly 26 fl oz. A good orange or lemon liqueur, or a homemade rum-and-citrus syrup, stands in; taste before adding more sugar, since the bottled article was sweet.
- Seville orangesBitter marmalade oranges, in the shops for a few weeks in midwinter. Their juice is sharp and aromatic rather than sweet. Out of season, use two parts sweet orange juice to one part lime, and keep the rind of a sweet orange for the sugar-rubbing.
- By the side of the fireThis means holding the bowl warm without cooking it for twenty minutes, to let the sugar dissolve fully and the rind flavour bloom. The book gives no temperature. A very low oven or a warm water bath does it. Do not simmer, and add the rum and brandy only after straining, off the heat.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus the juice, jelly, shrub and a pint of spirits comes to a little over a gallon; the number of servings depends on the size of cup. It is potent; the book expects a party.
Yorkshire punch belongs to the long English tradition of the bowl punch that shows off citrus in the dead of winter. The technique of rubbing sugar on the peel appears in punch-making from the eighteenth century onward, and the insistence here that no shortcut equals it is a fair report of the difference. Calf's foot jelly is the same clarified gelatin stock that appears throughout books of this era in invalid cookery and moulded desserts, folded in to give the punch a smooth, slightly viscous mouthfeel.