Home › Beverages › Beverages: Apollinaris
Beverages: Apollinaris
Juice 6 lemons, 2 cupfuls water, 1 pound sugar, Chopped rind 1 lemon, BEVERAGES bananas, 1 grated pineapple, bottle Maraschino cherries and their liquor, 2 quarts Apollinaris.
Put the water, sugar, and rind of lemon on to boil; boil five minutes, strain, and while hot slice into it the bananas, pineapple, cherries and their liquor. When ready to serve, put in the center of punch bowl a square block of ice; pour over it the Apollinaris; add to the fruit the juice of the lemons and put it all into the bowl.
Mulled Cider. 1 quart cider, 1 teaspoonful whole allspice, teaspoonful cassia buds, 3 eggs.
Put the cider with the spices in it in a saucepan and boil three minutes.
A late-Victorian fruit punch built on sparkling mineral water rather than spirits, of the kind poured from a bowl at receptions and weddings. Two of the fruit quantities have not survived legibly, so treat those as a matter of judgment.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water sold by the bottle throughout the English-speaking world; the word functions here as a brand name for fizzy water. Two quarts of any dry sparkling mineral water or club soda does the same job, and the faint salinity of a mineral water suits the sweetness better than plain seltzer.
- Missing quantitiesThe number of bananas and the size of the cherry bottle are not given in the text as printed. Three or four bananas and a standard small jar of cherries with their syrup are in proportion to six lemons and a whole pineapple; adjust rather than guess at an exact figure.
- Grated pineappleBefore canned fruit was universal, a fresh pineapple was peeled, cored and grated on a coarse box grater so the flesh broke down into juicy shreds. Crushed canned pineapple in juice is the nearest equivalent; drain off some of the packing liquid or the punch turns cloying.
- Maraschino cherriesAt the period of this book the name still generally meant cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, and the liquor poured in with them carried real flavour and a little alcohol. Modern bright-red cocktail cherries in corn syrup are a different product; luxardo-style cherries in their own dark syrup are the closer match.
- The syrup stepBoiling the water, sugar and lemon rind for five minutes makes a lemon-oil syrup, and the fruit is sliced into it while hot so it macerates as the syrup cools. Let it cool completely before assembling, or the ice melts instantly and the punch goes flat and watery.
- Lemon juice goes in lastThe juice of the six lemons is held back and added only at serving. Added early it would cook in the hot syrup and lose its edge; the point of the punch is the sharpness against the sugar.
- The block of iceA single large block melts far more slowly than cubes and was the standard way of chilling a punch bowl without diluting it. Freeze water in a loaf tin or a plastic tub the day before; a bag of ice cubes will thin the drink noticeably within the hour.
- YieldTwo quarts of mineral water plus syrup, juice and fruit comes to roughly a gallon, or about twenty-five punch-cup servings.
Apollinaris is a naturally carbonated spring water from the Ahr valley in the German Rhineland, developed commercially in the mid-nineteenth century and exported in dark bottles with a red triangle on the label; British and American advertising called it the Queen of Table Waters, and the name is sometimes said to have been used loosely in recipe books to mean sparkling mineral water of any kind, much as later generations wrote seltzer, though that is an inference rather than a documented usage. Its appearance at the base of a party punch is suggestive: a fruit punch made on mineral water, with only the syrup from a bottle of maraschino cherries carrying any alcohol, could be set out at a reception where spirits were unwelcome, though the page itself says nothing about the temperance leanings of the households the book addressed. The construction itself, sugar and citrus peel boiled to a syrup, fruit steeped in it, acid and fizz added at the last moment over a block of ice, is a standard Victorian punch-bowl formula and predates the branded water by well over a century.