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Fruit Punch II
1 cup water 2 cups strawberry syrup 2 cups sugar Juice 5 lemons 1 cup tea infusion Juice 5 oranges 1 quart Apollinaris 1 can grated pineapple 1 cup Maraschino cherries Make syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes; add tea, strawberry syrup, lemon juice, orange juice, and pineapple; let stand thirty minutes, strain, and add ice-water to make on and one-half gallons of liquid. Add cherries and Apollinaris. Serve in punch-bowl, with large piece of ice. This quantity will serve fifty.
A large-format party punch from the era when a punch bowl and a single quarried block of ice were standard equipment for entertaining. Nothing here is difficult; the work is in the scale and in the ice.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, sold widely in bottles in Britain and America around 1900. Any dry sparkling mineral water or plain seltzer stands in for the quart called for; add it at the last moment so it is still lively when served.
- Tea infusionMeaning a cup of strong brewed black tea, not tea leaves. Brew it about double strength and let it cool before combining, since hot tea steeped too long turns bitter and will dominate the fruit.
- Strawberry syrupA sweetened fruit syrup of the sort sold for soda fountains, generally heavier than most strawberry drink syrups sold today. Two cups of a good bar-quality fruit syrup works; if you use a thin cordial, taste before adding the full sugar syrup.
- The sugar syrupOne cup water to two cups sugar boiled ten minutes gives a heavy syrup. Watch it toward the end of the ten minutes so it does not begin to colour.
- Canned grated pineapple'Grated' was the period canning term for roughly what is now sold as crushed pineapple. The recipe does not give a can size; a 20 oz can of crushed pineapple, juice included, is a reasonable assumption. It is strained out later, so texture matters less than flavour.
- Final volumeThe finished punch is brought up to one and a half gallons, about 5.7 litres, with ice water. That is likely more than a punch bowl will hold at once, so plan on a stock pot or a beverage cooler and refill the bowl as it empties.
- The block of iceA single large piece of ice melts far more slowly than cubes and is the reason this punch survives a long party without going watery. Freeze water in a loaf pan or plastic tub a day ahead.
- YieldFifty servings as written, which works out at roughly four ounces a glass. To make a manageable amount, quarter everything.
Fruit punches of this kind were the backbone of the temperance reception, the church social and the summer lawn party in the decades either side of 1900, and cookery books of the period print them by the gallon rather than the glass. The mark of a good one was bought ingredients used well: soda-fountain fruit syrups, canned pineapple, maraschino cherries and imported bottled mineral water were all recent conveniences, and naming Apollinaris specifically signalled a certain standard, much as naming a brand of tonic water might now. The tea is not decoration but structure, supplying the tannin that keeps a very sweet drink from tasting flat, a trick still used in punch making. The instruction to serve with one large piece of ice belongs to the age of the icehouse and the ice wagon, when ice arrived as a sawn block and had to be chipped down for anything smaller.