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Currant Punch
Two glasses of currant jelly, the juice of three oranges, and two lemons, a half cup of sugar and a pint of boiling water. Dilute to strength desired and serve with cracked ice.
A jelly-based punch base, meant to be made as a concentrate and let down with water to taste. The whole thing hinges on dissolving the jelly completely while the water is still boiling.
- "Two glasses of currant jelly"Most likely two jelly glasses, the small tumblers jelly was put up in. Those ran roughly 6 to 8 ounces apiece, so figure somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 cups.
- Dissolve while it is hotWhisk the jelly into the pint of boiling water off the heat until no lumps remain, then add the citrus juice. Add cold juice to undissolved jelly and you get a stringy, pectin-clotted base that never comes smooth.
- Sugar is negotiableJellies vary a good deal in sweetness. Taste the base before adding the half cup; a quarter cup is often enough.
- Which currantRed currant jelly, not black currant preserve and nothing to do with dried Zante currants, which are grapes. Black currant will work but gives a much heavier, muskier drink.
- StrainPass the juice of the three oranges and two lemons through a sieve. Pulp and seed fragments will hang in suspension and make the punch look cloudy over ice.
- Dilution and yieldThe base comes to something over a quart. The recipe leaves the dilution to taste; at about one part base to two parts cold water it makes some 3 quarts, enough for roughly two dozen small punch cups. Add the water just before serving so the ice does not do all the diluting for you.
- IceCracked ice means ice broken small, not crushed to slush. Chill the base thoroughly first so the ice lasts in the glass.
Currant jelly was one of the few reliably tart preserves in a nineteenth-century American pantry, and cooks used it as an acid and a sweetener at once, in sauces for game as readily as in drinks. Punches built on jelly or on currant shrub turn up in the temperance-era recipe literature, where the goal was a bright, sharp party drink with no spirits in it, and later cookbooks carried the habit forward into the chapter of "cold drinks" served from a glass bowl with cracked ice. The reliance on a jar rather than fresh fruit is also practical history: cultivation of Ribes was restricted in the United States from the 1910s onward by a patchwork of state and federal measures, aimed especially at black currant, because currants and gooseberries host white pine blister rust, so fresh currants became scarce in American markets while the jelly stayed on the shelf.