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Beverages: Grated
Tutti-Frutti Punch. 2 quarts water, 1 pound sugar, Grated rind 2 lemons, Grated rind 4 oranges, Squeeze the juice from the lemons and remove the pips. Put it into the punch bowl with the sugar and stir until dissolved. Slice the oranges, shred the pineapple, hull and wash the berries; then add them all to the lemon juice. Put a large cube of ice in the punch bowl. Just before serving, add the carbonic water, which has previously been chilled. Juice from the lemons and oranges, 24 Malaga grapes, 2 slices tangerine oranges, 4 slices pineapple, 1 banana, 1 pint Maraschino cherries.
Cider Eggnog.
To each quart of cider allow 4 eggs.
This page runs two beverages together and both are incomplete as printed: the punch lists ingredients that never appear in the method and calls for others that were never measured, and the eggnog stops after a single line. Read it as a sketch of period practice rather than a working formula.
- Why the caution is hereThe Cider Eggnog is four raw eggs beaten into a quart of cider, never heated at any point, with no measured spirit and no quantity of sugar. Raw shell eggs in an unheated, unfortified drink carry a real Salmonella risk, and traditional sweet cider was unpasteurized as well. Use a current eggnog recipe if you want one.
- The missing piecesPineapple, berries and carbonic water are all used in the method but absent from the ingredient list, and the 2 quarts of water and grated rinds in the list never reappear in the instructions. Any quantity given for them here would be invention.
- Carbonic waterPeriod shorthand for charged or soda water — plain seltzer. It was bought in siphons or charged at home, and the instruction to chill it first matters: warm soda foams away the moment it meets sugar and fruit.
- Grated rindThe recipe never says what to do with the rind. One plausible reading is that it was to be rubbed with the sugar or steeped with the water and sugar as a syrup, which is where the oil-based aroma would come from; grated rind stirred loose into a punch bowl simply floats.
- The large cube of iceThis means a single block cut from an ice-house or delivered by the iceman, not cubes from a tray. One large mass melts far more slowly and is still the right approach; freeze water in a loaf pan or bowl rather than using small ice.
- PipsLemon seeds. They are removed because they turn the punch bitter as it stands.
- YieldThe total volume cannot be worked out, since the quantity of carbonic water and fruit is never given. Two quarts of water and a pound of sugar alone would fill much of a standard punch bowl, and punch was poured in quantities closer to a teacup than a tumbler.
"Tutti-frutti" — Italian for "all fruits" — was a nineteenth-century catch-all label attached to anything combining several fruits, from ice creams and preserves to chewing gum, and here it simply signals a punch built on whatever was in season alongside the citrus. Punch of this kind sat at the center of turn-of-the-century American entertaining, and part of its appeal may have been that it could be made without spirits: a bowl of iced fruit and charged water suited church socials, ladies' luncheons and temperance households, while the cider eggnog on the same page belongs to the same repertoire — though whether it was alcoholic is uncertain, since "cider" at this date often meant sweet, unfermented cider. Household Discoveries belongs to the large family of early-1900s American household encyclopedias that mixed cookery with cleaning, laundry and repair, and its beverage entries were compiled tersely — which is how a recipe like this one came to be printed with half its measurements stranded and half its method assumed.