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Currant Punch
4 cups currant juice 6 lemons 4 cups sugar 6 oranges 12 cups water 2 cups tea Boil sugar and water five minutes; add tea, juice, lemons and oranges sliced, and a large piece of ice. 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon sugar
A large-format reception punch built on a boiled sugar syrup, strong tea and red currant juice. The proportions are generous enough that the main decision is how much dilution you want from the ice.
- Ignore the last line"1 cup milk 1 teaspoon sugar" appears to be a stray fragment of a neighbouring recipe rather than part of the punch. There is no milk in a currant punch, and it would curdle at once in this much acid.
- Currant juiceRed currants, not dried Zante currants. Fresh red currants are seasonal and regional in the US; unsweetened bottled red currant juice or nectar, sold in European and Scandinavian groceries, is the practical substitute. Thawed frozen currants crushed and strained through a jelly bag give roughly a cup of juice per pound to pound and a half of fruit, depending on how hard they are pressed.
- The teaTwo cups of ordinary strong-brewed black tea, cooled. Brew it short — three or four minutes — since tea stewed longer turns harsh and the tannin becomes obvious once the punch is chilled and diluted.
- Syrup first, for a reasonBoiling the sugar with the full 12 cups of water for five minutes dissolves everything and drives off a little volume. Let the syrup cool before the juice and fruit go in; adding citrus and currant juice to boiling syrup dulls the fresh flavour.
- Lemons and orangesSliced, as written, so they steep as well as sweeten. If you want the punch to sit for more than an hour or two, strain the slices out — the white pith turns it bitter. Squeezing four of the twelve fruits and slicing the rest gives a cleaner result.
- "A large piece of ice"A single block, not cubes: it melts slowly and dilutes less. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a metal bowl the day before. Expect the finished punch to taste noticeably sweeter than it will once the block has been in the bowl an hour.
- YieldRoughly 22 cups before ice, which is 40 to 45 punch cups — a party quantity. Halve it freely; the recipe scales without trouble.
- Why it sits with the frozen dishesFreezing it — Partly frozen to a coarse slush it can be served in glasses; churned in an ice-cream freezer it becomes a currant water ice, and the sugar level is about right for that.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored books of the period it surrounds its chocolate chapters with a full general cookery collection — hence a punch bowl recipe in a candy company's volume. Red currants were then a common New England dooryard fruit, valued for jelly because they set firmly without added pectin, and juice left from jelly-making would have been an obvious base for a summer punch. Currant and gooseberry bushes were uprooted and their cultivation restricted in many states in the early twentieth century as hosts of white pine blister rust, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar in American kitchens now and why this recipe reads as more exotic than it was. The heavy pour of tea may reflect temperance-era entertaining, in which the punch bowl stayed on the table but the spirits came out of it.