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Fruit Punch
Of the making of punches there is no end, but I give one which slips down with ease. Put one pint of water and one pound of sugar and the chopped yellow rind of one lemon on to boil. Boil five minutes, strain, and while hot slice into it two bananas, one grated pineapple and half a bottle Maraschino cherries and their liquor. When ready to serve put in the center of your punch bowl a square block of ice; pour over it two quarts of Apollinaris; add to the fruit the juice of six lemons and put it all into the bowl.
Serve in thin, tall tumblers.-Anne Warner.
A syrup-based fruit punch of the sort served from a bowl at afternoon receptions. The only real technique is the syrup; everything after it is assembly and timing.
- The syrupOne pint water to one pound sugar is roughly 2 cups water to 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar. Five minutes at a boil is enough to dissolve and lightly thicken it; longer and it starts to reduce toward candy territory.
- Yellow rind only"Chopped yellow rind" means the zest with none of the white pith, which turns bitter when boiled. A vegetable peeler taking shallow strips is the easiest way to get it.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, widely sold in bottles in this period and something of a luxury import. Any dry, strongly carbonated mineral water stands in; two quarts is about two litres.
- Maraschino cherriesAt the time this was written maraschino cherries were often the genuine article, cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, so "their liquor" may have carried real alcohol. Modern supermarket maraschinos are sugar syrup and dye, and contribute sweetness rather than flavour. Cherries in kirsch or a good Italian amarena give something much closer to the original.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple, coarsely grated or crushed, juice and all. Canned crushed pineapple works, but if it is packed in syrup rather than juice you may want to cut back the sugar in the syrup.
- Add the bananas lateSliced into hot syrup they soften and grey quickly. If the punch is standing more than an hour, hold the bananas back and slice them in just before serving.
- The block of iceA single large block melts far more slowly than cubes and keeps the punch from watering down over an afternoon. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a plastic container the day before.
- Order of assemblySparkling water first over the ice, then the fruit and lemon juice poured in, so the carbonation survives. Fold rather than stir.
- YieldSomething under four quarts, or roughly sixteen to twenty servings in the tall tumblers specified.
Punch bowls were standard equipment in a well-run American household at the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period carry many variations built on the same frame: a boiled sugar syrup flavoured with citrus peel, fruit added while the syrup is hot, and a charged water poured over ice at the last moment. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the Ahr valley, was heavily advertised in English and American magazines as the "Queen of Table Waters" and its name functioned in recipes much as a brand does now, shorthand for good sparkling water. The recipe is printed over a contributor's name, as was common practice in periodicals and compiled collections of the period; Anne Warner was a popular American humorist and novelist of the 1900s. The tropical fruit in the bowl is worth noticing too: bananas and pineapple had both become markedly cheaper and more widely available to American households by this date.