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Fruit Punch III
1 cup sugar 1/3 cup lemon juice 1 cup hot tea infusion 1 pint ginger ale 3/4 cup orange juice 1 pint Apollinaris Few slices orange Pour tea over sugar, and as soon as sugar is dissolved add fruit juices. Strain into punch-bowl over a large piece of ice, and just before serving add ale, Apollinaris, and slices of orange. For tea infusion use two teaspoons tea and one and one-fourth cups boiling water.
A non-alcoholic tea punch of the sort that fills the beverage chapter of American household books from the early 1900s. Nothing here is difficult, but two ingredients need translating and the tea needs watching.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, once sold everywhere as a table water. Substitute any plain sparkling mineral water or club soda, one pint (2 cups).
- The teaTwo teaspoons of leaf to 1 1/4 cups boiling water makes a fairly strong infusion, since it is diluted roughly sixfold in the finished bowl. Steep black tea four minutes and strain the leaves out; longer extraction turns the punch astringent and slightly bitter under the sugar.
- Order of operationsThe sugar goes into the hot tea, not the cold juice, which is the whole reason tea is used hot. Once it has dissolved, the base can be chilled and held for several hours before serving.
- Fruit juice quantitiesOne-third cup lemon juice is roughly two large lemons; three-quarters cup orange juice is two to three oranges. Fresh juice is worth the trouble here, as the punch has little else in it.
- The iceA single large block, as specified, melts slowly and keeps the punch from watering down. A quart container or bundt pan frozen the day before does the job; cubes dilute the drink much faster.
- Carbonation timingGinger ale and mineral water go in at the last moment, as directed. Add them early and the punch is flat by the time the bowl is half emptied.
- YieldAbout 1 3/4 quarts, or twelve to fourteen punch-cup servings. It is sweet by modern taste; a third less sugar suits most palates, particularly with a sweetened ginger ale.
Fruit punches built on strong tea, citrus and a sparkling water were a fixture of American entertaining around 1900, when temperance sentiment and the fashion for afternoon receptions together produced an enormous number of alcohol-free bowls. Apollinaris, drawn from a spring in the German Ahr valley, was marketed in the English-speaking world as the "Queen of Table Waters" and appears by name in cookbooks of the period the way a brand does when it has become a generic; the recipe assumes any reader can buy it. Variants were commonly numbered -- Fruit Punch I, II, III -- though what that numbering reflects about how such books were compiled is not documented here.