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Beverages: Punch
Piazza Punch.
Juice 2 lemons, Juice 1 orange, 1 cupful sugar, 2 cupfuls grape juice, 2 cupfuls water.
Mix together the juice of the lemons and orange, add sugar, grape juice, and water. Place a small cake of ice in the bottom of a punch bowl or in a tall glass pitcher and pour in the liquid.
Lime Punch. cupful lime juice, 2½ cupfuls sugar sirup, 2 cupfuls pineapple juice, cupful orange.
Mix together the lime juice and sirup; then add the pineapple juice and orange. When ready to serve, put in glasses half filled with crushed ice and add a few Maraschino cherries.
Two non-alcoholic fruit punches from the era when a hostess kept a block of ice rather than cubes. Both are sweet by modern standards and both have gaps in the printed text worth flagging before you start.
- Missing fractionsThe Lime Punch calls for "cupful lime juice" and "cupful orange" — the fractions have dropped out of the printed text and cannot be recovered with certainty. Treat any figure you choose as a starting point and taste as you go.
- Sugar sirupThis means a cooked syrup, not granulated sugar: sugar and water simmered until clear, then cooled. Proportions varied from book to book, but at any strength 2½ cupfuls is a great deal of sweetening against 2 cups pineapple juice — start with half and add more.
- Grape juiceIn household books of this period this generally meant unfermented bottled Concord juice, thick and purple. Modern white grape juice will not give the same colour; look for 100 percent Concord.
- A small cake of iceA single block, chipped from a larger one, which melts slowly and dilutes less than cubes. A frozen quart container of water, or a bundt-pan ring of ice, does the same job.
- Order of mixingBoth recipes combine the sweetening with the citrus juice first, before the bulkier juices go in. In the Piazza Punch this helps, since granulated sugar dissolves poorly once the liquid is cold and diluted.
- Maraschino cherriesThe originals were cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, firm and faintly bitter. The bright red supermarket kind are dyed and sugar-brined; a jar of Luxardo-style cherries is closer to what was meant.
- YieldThe Piazza Punch makes roughly 1⅓ quarts before ice. The Lime Punch, with the syrup, comes to a similar volume.
Punch recipes like these belong to the American temperance-era side of a very old drink: the word is often traced to a Sanskrit word for five, for the five classical ingredients of spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice, though the derivation is disputed and other origins have been proposed. Strip out the spirit and you are left with exactly what these two formulas are — citrus, sweetening, dilution and ice. Household manuals of the period printed many of them for church socials, lawn parties and afternoon calls, and bottled unfermented grape juice of the kind that anchors the Piazza Punch was itself promoted as a wholesome substitute for wine. "Piazza" was in use in parts of the South and New England for a covered porch, which may be the sense intended here.