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Beverages: Pour
Pour it carefully over the eggs, which habe been beaten thoroughly, and serve hot.
Raspberry and Currant Punch.
A pleasant drink is made of raspberries and currants-a pint of the former to a quart of the latter.
Bruise the fruit in a preserving kettle with a potato masher and pour over it 2 quarts cold water. Put the kettle over a moderate fire, where it will heat gradually. After it begins to boil, remove the kettle from the fire; pour the contents into a jelly bag and let it drain through the bag into a large bowl. When it is clear and cool, ice and sweeten it and serve in little glasses.
Tea Punch. 1 quart boiling water, 4 tablespoonfuls tea, 1 cupful granulated sugar, Juice 4 lemons, pint Apollinaris.
Pour the boiling water over the tea; cover and leave for five minutes; strain off and cool. Half fill the punch bowl with cracked ice, add the sugar and strained juice of the lemons. Pour the tea over these, and, as it goes to table, add the Apollinaris. Strew a handful of mint sprays on the surface and serve at once.
Cocoa Nibs or "Shells."
Wet 2 ounces cocoa shells with a little cold water and stir into them a quart of boiling water. Boil steadily for an hour and a half; strain, stir in a quart of fresh milk, bring almost to the scalding point, and serve. Sweeten in the cups.
Raspberry Vinegar.
Mash the berries and, when reduced to a pulp, add enough vinegar to cover them. Set close by the stove for twelve hours, stirring often. Strain and press; add as many raspberries (mashed) to the vinegar as before; cover and leave in the hot sun for six hours. Now strain, and measure the juice; add half as much water as you have juice, and stir into this 5 pounds granulated sugar for every 3 pints of liquid. Bring slowly to a boil, let it boil up once, and strain. Bottle, cork, and seal.- MARION HARLAND.
Five separate beverages run together here, the first cut off mid-sentence from a hot egg drink on the previous page. The two worth planning around are the tea punch, which is assembled at the last minute, and the raspberry vinegar, which is a shrub syrup meant to be diluted rather than drunk straight.
- The opening fragment"Pour it carefully over the eggs" belongs to a hot egg beverage whose beginning is on the preceding page. There is no way to reconstruct the quantities from what survives here, and a hot liquid poured over beaten raw egg does not reliably bring the egg to a safe temperature. Treat it as a stray line, not a recipe.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water from the Apollinarisbrunnen in the Ahr valley, sold worldwide in the late nineteenth century and a fixture of Victorian punch bowls. Any dry, well-carbonated seltzer or club soda stands in; add it at the table, as directed, or the punch goes flat before it is poured.
- Tea strengthFour tablespoons of loose black tea to a quart is a strong brew, which is correct here because the punch is then poured over a bowl half full of cracked ice. Five minutes is the whole steep; longer makes it bitter and no amount of sugar or lemon covers that.
- Cocoa shells versus nibsThe title treats them as interchangeable, but they are not. Cocoa shells are the papery husks winnowed off the roasted bean, cheap and weak, which is why they can stand an hour and a half at a boil. Modern cacao nibs are the bean itself; boiled that long they give a harsh, over-extracted drink, and 20 to 30 minutes is nearer the mark. "Almost to the scalding point" after the milk goes in means about 180F, not a boil.
- Preserving kettle and jelly bagUse stainless steel or enamel throughout, particularly for the raspberry vinegar. Bare copper and aluminium react with acid and will taint the syrup and discolour it. A jelly bag is a fine flannel or double-muslin bag; a colander lined with a doubled square of cheesecloth does the same work. Let it drain rather than squeezing if you want the raspberry and currant drink clear.
- Fire terms"A moderate fire, where it will heat gradually" is medium-low on a modern burner. The fruit only needs to reach a boil to release its juice; the drink is then removed at once.
- Sun-steepingThe second raspberry infusion is set in "the hot sun for six hours." The vinegar keeps the mixture strongly acidic, which probably limited spoilage, though that is inference rather than tested practice; a covered bowl in a warm kitchen, or a very low oven around 150F, gives the same extraction without the guesswork of weather.
- The sugar ratioFive pounds of sugar to three pints of liquid gives a dense syrup, deliberately so — this is a cordial base to keep in bottles, not a beverage. Serve one to two tablespoons in a tumbler of cold or sparkling water. Bottled and refrigerated it should keep well; the sealing described here is most likely wax over the cork rather than any modern canning process.
- YieldsThe raspberry and currant drink gives roughly two quarts of juice before icing, enough for eight to ten of the small glasses called for. The tea punch serves six to eight, and the cocoa about six cups once the water has boiled down and the milk is stirred in.
Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune (1830–1922), whose Common Sense in the Household of 1871 made her one of the most widely reprinted American domestic writers of the century; compilations like this one quoted her by name because her name sold. The raspberry vinegar is the oldest thing on the page: fruit-and-vinegar syrups, generally called shrubs, were being made in English and American kitchens well before refrigeration, valued because the acid and the heavy sugar preserved a summer crop into winter and because diluted vinegar was thought to be more refreshing in heat than plain sweetened water. The tea punch points the other way, toward a fashionable table, with its punch bowl, cracked ice and branded imported mineral water. Cocoa shells belong to neither camp — they were the by-product of chocolate manufacture, sold by the pound as an economical drink for households that could not stretch to prepared cocoa, and they disappeared from grocers' shelves as cocoa powder itself became cheap.