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Singapore Punch
2 quarts boiling water 1 pound sugar 4 lemons 4 oranges 2 tangerine oranges 2 slices pineapple 1 banana 1 pint Maraschino cherries 2 dozen malaga grapes Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water. Add the grated rind of two lemons and four oranges, and boil for 15 minutes. Strain the syrup and add one quart of cold water. Strain the juice of the lemons and oranges, and mix with two dozen Malaga grapes, cut in half and seeded, the tangerine oranges sliced, the pineapple shredded, the bananas cut in slices, and one pint of Maraschino cherries with their liquor. Add the fruit to the syrup, chill and serve.
A large-format fruit punch built on a boiled citrus-rind syrup, from an era when a punch bowl was expected to serve a party rather than a pitcher. It scales down cleanly, but two of the ingredients no longer mean what they did.
- YieldThree quarts of syrup and water plus roughly a quart of fruit and juice gives about a gallon, or 16 cups. Halve everything for an ordinary gathering.
- Maraschino cherriesIn this period these were sour marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, and "their liquor" was the point. Today's supermarket jar is a bleached sweet cherry in dyed corn syrup. Luxardo or another Italian cherry in syrup is the closer match; if you use the bright red kind, cut the sugar.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, seeded white table grape, Spanish in origin and also grown in California, sold widely in American markets then and rare now. Any firm seedless green grape, halved, does the same job; skip the seeding step.
- The rind syrup is the hingeFifteen minutes of hard boiling with citrus zest will draw out bitterness along with the oil. Keep it at a bare simmer, taste at ten minutes, and strain as soon as it smells strongly of orange.
- SugarA pound is a little over two cups, which is heavy by current taste given the fruit and cherry syrup that follow. Start with a cup and a half and adjust after the juices go in.
- Tangerines"Tangerine oranges" means what we call tangerines or mandarins. The recipe says only that they are sliced; slice them crosswise, or segment them if you would rather not have peel in the bowl.
- Add the banana lastSliced banana browns and goes soft within the hour. Cut it in just before serving rather than letting it sit through the chilling.
- Chilling and iceChill the punch itself thoroughly rather than pouring it over ice, which dilutes it fast. A frozen block or ring of the punch, or of plain water, holds better than cubes in a bowl this size.
This belongs to the wave of "tropical" punches that appeared on American and British tables in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when pineapple, imported Spanish grapes and Italian maraschino cherries could all be had in a city grocery at once. Names of this kind often signalled the port a fruit was imagined to come from rather than any actual local drink. What is genuinely old is the structure: punch takes its name from a family of spiced citrus-and-sugar drinks that British traders encountered in India, and the word is generally traced to the Hindi and Sanskrit for five, the traditional number of ingredients.