Home › Cold Drinks › Cider and Vermouth Punch
Cider and Vermouth Punch
To one quart of sweet cider add the juice of two oranges and one lemon, strained, and a cupful of Italian vermouth. Stir well and put on ice to chill. Serve in tall glasses with a ripe strawberry in each.
A simple stirred punch that depends entirely on getting two ambiguous words right: "cider" and "vermouth" both mean something different in an American book of this vintage than they might today.
- Sweet ciderIn American usage this is fresh, unfermented apple juice, cloudy and non-alcoholic — not the fermented drink sold as cider in Britain or as hard cider in the US now. Unfiltered pressed cider from a farm stand or the refrigerated case is the closest match; clear filtered apple juice will work but tastes thinner and sweeter.
- Italian vermouthPeriod bar language for sweet red vermouth (French vermouth meant dry white). Any decent rosso — Carpano, Cinzano, Martini — is what the author meant.
- A cupfulEight fluid ounces, 240 ml. Against a quart of cider that gives roughly one part vermouth to four parts juice, so the finished punch lands somewhere near 3 percent alcohol. Mild, but not a soft drink.
- Vermouth is wineAn opened bottle oxidises within weeks at room temperature and starts tasting stewed. Keep it corked in the refrigerator and use one that has not been standing on a shelf since last year, or the punch will taste flat and vaguely medicinal.
- Put on ice to chillThe instruction means chill the mixture in the icebox or over a bath of ice, not to add ice cubes to it. Cider punches turn watery fast; chill everything to refrigerator temperature and serve over as little ice as the glass allows.
- Strain the citrusTwo oranges and one lemon give roughly two-thirds of a cup of juice combined, depending on size. Straining out pulp and pips matters here because the drink is served in tall clear glasses and never shaken.
- The strawberrySweet cider is an autumn product and strawberries are a June crop, so the original garnish assumed either a hothouse berry or a bottled cider. A hulled strawberry dropped into the glass is decorative rather than flavourful — a wide orange twist does more for the vermouth.
- YieldClose to six cups of finished punch, so five or six tall glasses. It does not keep: mix the day you serve it, as the citrus goes dull overnight.
Vermouth is aromatised, fortified wine, and the sweet Italian style — dark, bitter-edged, heavy on botanicals — was established in American bars by the later nineteenth century, where it figured in drinks such as the Manhattan. What makes it interesting here is the legal problem the editor's note flags: from January 1920 to December 1933 vermouth could not lawfully be sold in the United States, which puts this recipe either after repeal or in the hands of a reader assumed to be quietly stocked. Punches of this kind, a base of fruit juice lengthened with a light wine and served in tall glasses, were a common summer entertaining drink of the interwar decades, and many were mild enough to sit closer to a fruit cup than a cocktail. The pairing of apple cider with sweet vermouth is less odd than it looks: both are sweet, both carry a bitter background note, and the citrus keeps the whole thing from turning cloying.