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Claret Punch
1 quart cold water Few shavings lemon rind 1/2 cup raisins 1 1/3 cups orange juice 2 cups sugar 1/3 cup lemon juice 2 inch piece stick cinnamon 1 pint claret wine Put raisins in cold water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and boil twenty minutes; strain, add sugar, cinnamon, lemon rind, and boil five minutes. Add fruit juice, cool, strain, pour in claret, and dilute with ice-water. Fruit Punch I 1 quart cold water 1/2 cup lemon juice 2 cups sugar 2 cups chopped pineapple 1 cup orange juice Boil water, sugar, and pineapple twenty minutes; add fruit juice, cool, strain, and dilute with ice-water.
A cooked syrup base flavoured with raisins, cinnamon and citrus, cooled and then let down with wine and ice-water. The order matters: everything that needs heat is done before the claret goes in.
- Add the wine coldThe claret is poured in only after the syrup has cooled, and it is never heated. Warming it drives off the alcohol and dulls the fruit; if you are working ahead, chill the base thoroughly first.
- ClaretNineteenth- and early twentieth-century American usage means red Bordeaux, or any dry red in that style. A modest Cabernet, Merlot or Bordeaux blend works; avoid anything oaky or high in alcohol, which fights the spice.
- Raisins as flavouringBoiling raisins twenty minutes extracts sugar and a faint winey depth into the water, then they are strained out. Use dark raisins for more colour and body; the spent fruit is discarded.
- SugarTwo cups against a quart of water is a heavy syrup by current taste, and the recipe assumes considerable dilution at the end. Cut to one to one and a half cups if you plan to serve it barely diluted.
- Cinnamon and lemon rindOnly five minutes of boiling for the spice and peel. Longer turns the rind bitter, so pull the pan promptly and strain again after cooling.
- Diluting"Dilute with ice-water" is left to the maker. Start with about a quart of ice-water for the whole batch, taste, and stop when the sweetness reads as refreshing rather than syrupy.
- YieldAs written the punch base runs to roughly two quarts before dilution, and rather more once let down and iced. Serve over ice in a bowl, with lemon slices if you want it dressed.
Claret cup and claret punch were fixtures of American entertaining from the mid-1800s onward, occupying the ground between a wine and a soft drink: strong enough to count as a party beverage, weak enough after dilution to be handed round at afternoon receptions and church socials. The name preserves an old English trade term -- claret, from the French clairet, once meaning a pale red wine, hardened in English usage into the standard word for the reds of Bordeaux, which arrived in quantity through long-established shipping ties. Cookbooks of this era print punches in batteries of numbered variants, alcoholic and not, on much the same boiled sugar-and-fruit base -- as the Fruit Punch I that follows on this page shows.