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Armistice Punch
Dissolve one and one half cups of sugar with one cup of hot water, adding one cup of orange juice and one half cup of lemon juice. Strain through a fine sieve into a punch bowl over cracked ice. When ready to serve, add one pint of ginger ale and one pint of Lithia. Put in one orange sliced in thin slices and some preserved cherries.
A straightforward fruit punch built on a hot-water sugar syrup, thinned at the last minute with two carbonated waters. The only genuinely dated ingredient is the Lithia.
- Lithia waterA bottled mineral water sold as containing lithium salts, marketed for gout and "nerves" and widely sold by druggists in this period. Any plain sparkling mineral water or club soda will stand in here; the lithium content was never what made the drink taste good.
- Dissolve the sugar fullyStir until the liquid runs clear before adding any juice, or undissolved crystals will settle in the bottom of the bowl.
- Cool the syrup before it meets the iceAdding hot syrup straight over cracked ice melts a great deal of it and waters the punch down. Let the sweetened juice mixture come to room temperature or chill it, then pour it over the ice.
- Juice quantitiesOne cup of orange juice is roughly three medium oranges; half a cup of lemon juice is three to four lemons. Fresh juice matters here, since there is nothing else in the glass to hide a tired bottled flavour.
- Carbonate lastThe ginger ale and mineral water go in at the moment of serving, exactly as written. Mixed in advance they flatten within the half hour and the punch turns cloying.
- Preserved cherriesProbably cherries put up in syrup rather than a bright red cocktail cherry, though maraschino-style cherries were also on sale by this date. Either works; drain them so the syrup does not sweeten the bowl further.
- YieldThe measured liquids come to about seven cups, roughly one and three quarter quarts before ice, enough for a dozen or more small punch cups.
The book this comes from was published in 1919, the year after the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the year the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, and its title says everything about its purpose: to be on the water wagon was to be off drink, and Uncle Sam was about to put the whole country there. Collections like this one gave hostesses a repertoire of punches, shrubs and fruit cups that could hold a bowl at the centre of a room without any spirits in them. The Lithia in the recipe is of a piece with the period: lithia water was a mainstream bottled mineral water of the era, sold on health claims that pharmacology has long since discarded, and it appears in period drink books simply as the fizzy neutral water a cook could buy.