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Fruit Punch
1 1/2 cups sugar 1 cup hot water 1 cup orange juice 1 orange sliced 1/2 cup lemon juice 1 pint ginger ale 1 pint Lithia water Maraschino cherries Dissolve the sugar with the water and add the fruit juices. Strain into a punch bowl over large piece of ice, and just before serving, add ale, Lithia, slices of orange and the cherries.
A straightforward syrup-and-juice punch of the punch-bowl era. Only one ingredient has genuinely disappeared, and the sweetness needs a second look.
- Lithia waterA bottled mineral water sold as a health tonic, containing lithium salts in what was usually a trace amount. It is not sold as such today; any plain sparkling mineral water fills the same role, which is simply to add fizz and a slight mineral edge without more sugar.
- Sugar, and how muchA cup and a half of sugar in roughly seven cups of finished punch is very sweet by current taste, and the ginger ale adds more. Start with about a cup, dissolved in the hot water, and taste after the juices go in.
- The syrup stepThe hot water is there only to dissolve the sugar. The recipe does not say to cool it, but letting the syrup come down to room temperature before the juices go in keeps the fresh orange and lemon tasting brighter.
- A pintA US pint is 2 cups, so this is 2 cups ginger ale and 2 cups sparkling water against 1 1/2 cups juice plus syrup.
- The large piece of iceNot decoration. A single block melts far more slowly than cubes and keeps the punch from watering down over an hour of serving. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a plastic container the day before.
- Carbonation timingThe instruction to add the ale and sparkling water "just before serving" is the hinge. Both go flat quickly over ice; hold them back and pour them in at the bowl.
- Maraschino cherriesCherries of this period might be preserved in maraschino liqueur or brine-cured and packed in sugar syrup; dyed red versions were also on sale by then. Cocktail cherries packed in their own syrup are the nearer match to the liqueur-preserved kind.
- YieldAbout 7 cups, or eight to ten small punch-cup servings.
Fruit punch of this kind belongs to American entertaining of the early twentieth century: the punch bowl kept its ceremonial place at receptions and church socials, but the base shifted from rum or claret to citrus, sugar syrup and a bottled sparkling water. Lithia water is the period marker here. Naturally lithium-bearing springs were bottled and marketed heavily in the United States from the late nineteenth century, promoted for gout and "nervous" complaints, and the branded bottles were common enough on a household sideboard that a cookbook could call for a pint without explanation. Federal scrutiny of such health claims in the 1910s, along with the eventual understanding that the lithium content was negligible, is generally credited with pushing the category out of the grocery trade.