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Apple Punch
Bake until half done six green apples with five or six cloves stuck in each apple. Put them while hot into a large dish with one lemon sliced thin, and three dozen allspice; cover all with granulated sugar and let stand overnight. The next morning add a quart of plain syrup and simmer until the apples separate from the cores. When cool, put into a punch bowl with slices of lemon, one fourth teaspoonful of powdered cinnamon, two teaspoonfuls of vanilla, and slice two bananas and put on the top. Dilute with more plain syrup. Serve two tablespoonfuls in each glass, with the same amount of plain cream, or ice cream, and fill up the glass with any charged water. Decorate with slices of lemon and banana.
This is a soda-fountain formula, not a bowl of punch in the party sense: what you make is a spiced apple syrup that gets dispensed two tablespoons at a time and finished with cream and carbonated water at the glass. Read it that way and the odd proportions make sense.
- Plain syrupFountain shorthand for simple sugar syrup, and at the counter it was usually made heavy — fountain manuals generally give something in the region of two parts granulated sugar to one part water by weight, boiled briefly and cooled. A quart of it is what carries the whole batch, so a thin 1:1 syrup will give you a wetter, less stable base.
- Charged waterCarbonated water from the fountain siphon. Any unflavoured seltzer or soda water works; club soda adds a faint mineral salinity that is not unwelcome here.
- Green applesNot unripe windfalls but hard, tart cooking apples, the sort period recipes call green. Granny Smith, Bramley or any firm tart variety holds shape through the baking and then collapses obligingly during the simmer.
- Bake until half doneThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A moderate oven for roughly 20 to 25 minutes should leave the apples softened and weeping juice but still holding together, since they finish cooking in the syrup the next day.
- Three dozen allspiceThirty-six whole allspice berries, not ground. Same for the cloves — whole, stuck into the skins so they can be fished out later. Strain the berries and cloves out before the punch goes into the bowl unless you want a guest to bite one.
- Overnight standingThe sugar covering draws juice from the hot apples and forms a syrup. The recipe does not say where to keep it; refrigerate it, and give the covered dish a day at most.
- Vanilla and cinnamonTwo teaspoons of vanilla extract is a lot by modern taste. Vanilla was among the most popular fountain flavourings of the period, and it does carry through cream and carbonation. Add half, taste, then decide.
- The bananasThey are garnish and they brown fast. Slice them onto the bowl immediately before serving rather than letting them sit in the syrup.
- Yield and serviceSix apples and a quart of syrup, once diluted, gives something in the region of two quarts of base; at two tablespoons a glass that is upwards of sixty servings. In the glass: two tablespoons base, two tablespoons cream or a small scoop of vanilla ice cream, then top with soda. The cream may curdle slightly against the acid apple and lemon.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the body of non-alcoholic drink books published as American temperance sentiment built toward national Prohibition — the title is a joke on "riding the water wagon," the period phrase for abstaining. Drugstore fountains were the commercial beneficiaries of that movement, and books of syrups, phosphates, egg drinks and "punches" followed in quantity. The word punch here is borrowed from the alcoholic tradition, spices, citrus and all, and applied to something a temperance household could drink without comment. What distinguishes this one is that it is a two-day preparation for a drink served by the glass.