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Currant Punch
Make a syrup of a pint each of sugar and water, boiling and skimming. Add juice of an orange and lemon; strain, and mix in a glass of currant jelly or half pint currant juice. Let cool, then add shaved ice and charged water.
A cold punch built on a plain sugar syrup, sharpened with citrus and currant. The proportions are sound; only the vocabulary needs updating.
- The syrupA pint of sugar and a pint of water by volume gives roughly 2 cups sugar to 2 cups water — a light 1:1 syrup, rather than the richer 2:1 syrup some modern bar books call for. Boil only until clear; longer concentrates it and the punch turns cloying.
- SkimmingThe foam that rises is impurities carried in period sugar. Modern granulated sugar throws off very little, so expect almost nothing to skim; the instruction is a holdover from an era of less consistently refined sugar.
- "A glass of currant jelly"Genuinely imprecise. Period tumblers and jelly tumblers varied, commonly somewhere in the range of 6–8 oz. Since the recipe offers half a pint of juice as the equivalent, treat it as about 8 oz of jelly and stir it into the still-hot syrup so it dissolves fully.
- Charged waterPlain carbonated water — seltzer or club soda. It was sold in siphons and charged bottles at the time. Add it at the last moment, over the ice, or the punch goes flat before it reaches the glass.
- CurrantsRed currants are the likely intent; they carry the acidity and the colour. Black currants will work but are far more assertive and will bury the orange. Ribes cultivation was restricted in many US states for much of the twentieth century because of white pine blister rust, and currants remain uncommon here; good-quality red currant jelly is the easier route.
- Strain when warmStrain the citrus juice and syrup while still warm, before the jelly sets anything up. A fine sieve catches pulp and pips; cheesecloth gives a clearer punch if you want it.
- Shaved iceShaved or cracked ice, not cubes. It chills fast and dilutes fast, which is the point in a punch served from a bowl — but it means the drink should be assembled just before serving.
- YieldThe syrup base makes roughly a quart before dilution. With ice and soda, figure 8 to 10 punch cups, or 6 tall glasses.
Punch recipes of this kind sit at the point where the Victorian punch bowl met the soda fountain. The older form was spirituous and often served warm; by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, temperance sentiment and the spread of commercially charged water encouraged a class of fruit punches that were non-alcoholic and fizzy. Currants were an obvious base: a common garden fruit, and one that sets into jelly reliably because of its high pectin and acid, so households with a garden were likely to have jars of it standing by. That the recipe offers the jelly and the fresh juice as interchangeable suggests the jelly was the more likely thing to have on the shelf in the off-season.