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Beverages: Beat
Beat the yolks until they assume the consistency of creat Beat the whites to a stiff froth. Stir together the cider and beaten yolks and sweeten Stir in half the beaten to taste. whites and season slightly with grated nutmeg. Stand on ice until cold. Serve in punch glasses with a Juice from the lemons and teaspoonful of the meringue on top oranges, 24 Malaga grapes, 2 slices tangerine oranges, 4 slices pineapple, 1 banana, 1 pint Maraschino cherries.
The special characteristic of the above recipe is found in the Maraschino cherries, which give a peculiar zest to the punch. Boil five minutes 1 quart of the water and sugar; add the grated rinds of the lemons and oranges and continue boiling for ten minutes longer. Strain the sirup through cheese cloth and add 1 quart cold water. Extract the juice from the lemons and oranges, strain, and mix with the grapes, cut in half and seeded, oranges, pineapple, sliced banana, and the Maraschino cherries with their liquor, the cherries being halved. Serve from a punch bowl in which a cube of ice has been placed.
Two drinks sit on this page: a cold cider-and-egg cup finished with a spoonful of egg-white meringue, and a large fruit punch built on a boiled lemon-and-orange syrup. The egg cup is the reason for the caution above.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe yolks are beaten into cold cider and the whites are floated on top; nothing in the method brings either above room temperature, and the drink is then held on ice and served. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the yolk, and chilling does not reduce it. This style of cold egg drink should be made only from a current recipe using pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base.
- Cider means what, exactlyIn a book of this date "cider" in a beverage recipe is usually unfermented sweet cider, though hard cider was also common and the text does not say. The alcohol in hard cider would not make the raw egg safe in any case.
- The punch syrupThe syrup is a plain boiled sugar-water: five minutes with a quart of water and the sugar, then ten minutes more with the grated citrus rinds, strained through cloth and let down with a second quart of cold water. Grate only the coloured zest; white pith carried into a ten-minute boil turns the syrup bitter.
- Malaga grapesA large, thick-skinned, seeded table grape once sold widely in American markets. Any firm seedless green grape, halved, does the same work; the halving matters more than the variety, since it lets the fruit take up syrup.
- Maraschino cherries then and nowThe recipe leans on the cherries and their liquor for its character. Period maraschino cherries were preserved in maraschino liqueur; the supermarket jar is now a sugar-and-dye syrup with no liqueur in it. Use cocktail cherries packed in liqueur or the punch will taste flat and merely sweet.
- One large cube"A cube of ice" means a single block cut from a larger piece, not tray cubes. A block melts slowly and keeps the punch from watering down over an evening; a large bowl or loaf tin frozen solid gives the same result.
- YieldThe text gives two quarts of water, but the sugar and citrus quantities are missing from this page, so any total is approximate: with the juices and fruit, something around three quarts, or roughly two dozen small punch-cup servings.
Household manuals of what appears to be the early 1900s treated the punch bowl as a centre of home entertaining, and their recipes often follow a similar pattern: a boiled sugar syrup infused with grated citrus rind, thinned with cold water, sharpened with strained juice, then loaded with whatever fruit the season and the grocer allowed. What dates this particular version is its pride in the maraschino cherry. Genuine maraschino cherries came from Dalmatia, where marasca cherries were preserved in the liqueur distilled from them, and they reached American tables as an expensive imported delicacy; a writer could reasonably present them as the thing that gave a punch "a peculiar zest." The cheap dyed imitation that later took over the name was spreading by this period and eventually displaced the original almost entirely in American use. The cold cider-and-egg cup on the same page belongs to the older family of egg drinks -- flips, nogs and possets -- which household books printed freely in an era before raw shell eggs were widely linked to foodborne illness.