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Beverages: Juice
Pineapple Punch. 1 cupful grated pineapple, 2 cupfuls water, 2 cupfuls sugar, cupful fresh-made tea, Juice 3 oranges, Juice 3 lemons, 1 cupful grape juice, 2½ quarts water.
Put the pineapple and 2 cupfuls water to boil for fifteen minutes.
Strain through cheese cloth, pressing out all the juice. Add 1 pint of water to the sugar, which has been boiled ten minutes, then add the tea, juice of the oranges and lemons, grape juice, and the balance of the water. Put in a punch bowl with a large lump of ice. Serve perfectly chilled in sherbet glasses.
Fruit Punch.
A large-format temperance punch, built on a pineapple decoction and a sugar syrup. The proportions are sound; the wording of the syrup step is the only place that trips people up.
- The syrup step, untangledThe wording is ambiguous: it can be read either as boiling the 2 cupfuls of sugar with 1 pint (2 cups) of water for ten minutes, or as adding a pint of water that has itself been boiled ten minutes to the sugar. Either way the sugar is not meant to be boiled dry.
- "The balance of the water"The pint used for the syrup is not listed separately, so it appears to be drawn from the 2½ quarts; the balance would then be roughly 2 quarts, added last. Taste before committing all of it.
- Total yieldRoughly a gallon, or about twenty-five servings of 5 oz. Halve it for a small gathering; the recipe scales cleanly.
- Grated pineappleOne cupful means fresh pineapple grated or shredded on a box grater, juice included. Crushed canned pineapple works, but drain off the packing syrup or cut the sugar by a quarter cup to compensate.
- The tea"Fresh-made tea" here most likely means black tea brewed at ordinary drinking strength, not a concentrate. Brew it, cool it, and add it cold — hot tea poured into the bowl may cloud as it chills and dull the citrus.
- Grape juiceUnfermented bottled grape juice, most likely Concord, sweet and deep purple. Modern Concord juice is comparable; white grape juice loses the colour the punch depends on.
- The lump of iceA single large block, not cubes. Freeze water in a loaf pan or bowl the day before. It chills without diluting, which matters over the hour or two a punch bowl sits out.
- Sherbet glassesSmall stemmed glasses of about 4 to 6 oz. Any punch cup or small wine glass serves the same purpose.
Punch reached English drinking through the East India trade, and the name is usually traced to a Hindi word for five, after the five components of the original — spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice — though that derivation is traditional rather than settled. Non-alcoholic fruit punches of this kind were common in American households where serving liquor was not done, though spirituous punch did not disappear. The cupful of bottled grape juice is the period marker: commercially pasteurised unfermented grape juice was promoted from the later nineteenth century as a wholesome alternative to wine, and it appears in punch recipes of this era, colouring the bowl and hinting at something stronger than it is.