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Hot Grape Punch
Use three sliced oranges for each quart of grape wine and several broken sticks of cinnamon. Heat the spice and grated rind of the oranges with the wine; strain, and add the sliced oranges.
A mulled wine in miniature — the whole method is in two sentences, and most of what a modern cook needs is what the original assumes you already know.
- Never let it boilThe one instruction the recipe omits. Hold the wine between 160 and 175F, just steaming with no bubbles breaking the surface. A boil drives off the alcohol and turns the orange rind bitter.
- "Grape wine"In a book of this vintage this most likely means homemade wine from Concord or another American grape — sweet, low in alcohol, often foxy in flavor. A soft, fruity red such as Lambrusco, Concord table wine, or a young Merlot stands in well.
- SugarNo sweetener is called for, presumably because a homemade grape wine would already have been sweet. With a dry commercial red, expect to add 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar or honey per quart, dissolved while the wine warms.
- Rind and slicesGrate the zest from the three oranges before slicing them; the grated rind goes into the hot wine, the slices go in afterward. Take only the colored layer — the white pith is bitter.
- Cinnamon"Several broken sticks" per quart is generous by modern taste. Two sticks, snapped in half, is enough for a quart; more than that and the spice buries the fruit.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch grated zest and cinnamon fragments, which otherwise cloud the cup and keep steeping.
- Steeping timeTwenty to thirty minutes at a bare steam extracts plenty. Longer at higher heat gains nothing and costs alcohol.
- YieldA quart plus the orange makes about six small punch cups. Serve in warmed heatproof glass or pottery; a cold cup drops the temperature immediately.
Heating wine with citrus and warm spices is one of the oldest ways of dressing up a modest bottle, and it runs from medieval hippocras through the wassail bowl to the mulled wines and hot punches of nineteenth-century American parlors. What dates this particular version is the wine itself: by the late 1800s grape wine in an American household might well have been made at home from Concord grapes, the hardy blue-black variety generally traced to Ephraim Bull's plantings in Concord, Massachusetts, which spread rapidly because it ripened reliably in a short northern season. Cookbooks organized by fruit, like this one, gave the grape a chapter of its own, and a hot punch was the natural end of that sequence \— a use for the sweet, mild homemade wine that a good grape year left in the cellar.