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Blackberry Punch
To one quart of blackberry juice and one quart of grape juice add four and one half pounds of sugar. Stir until sugar is dissolved and then bring to the boiling point. Strain through a jelly bag or a fine sieve, and when cool add one pint of lemon syrup. Pour into punch bowl over a block of ice. A few blackberries may be added.
This is really a syrup base rather than a finished drink: two quarts of juice carrying four and a half pounds of sugar comes out at roughly twice the sweetness of commercial soda, so plan on dilution.
- Sugar and dilutionFour and one half pounds is about 10 cups of granulated sugar, which with two quarts of juice yields a heavy syrup around 50 percent sugar by weight. Serve it cut with cold water or plain soda water; the melting ice block in the original bowl was doing part of that work.
- Lemon syrupA period lemon syrup is strained lemon juice cooked with sugar, though the proportions vary from source to source. Note that a cup of juice with a cup of sugar dissolves to well under the pint called for, so more of each is needed.
- Blackberry juiceCrush the berries, warm them gently to break down the cells, then drip through a jelly bag without pressing hard if you want a clear punch. Roughly 3 lb of blackberries gives a quart of juice.
- Grape juiceThis means unfermented Concord juice, dark and strongly flavoured. Bottled Concord juice is the right substitute; light white grape juice will read as thin here.
- Bring to the boiling pointThat means just to a boil and no longer. Held at a simmer the fresh fruit aroma cooks off and the color dulls toward brown.
- Strain warm, add lemon coolThe recipe's order has the syrup strained while still hot, which catches the scum boiling throws up, and the lemon syrup added only after cooling; no reason is given for that order.
- Block iceA single large block was used because it melts slowly and dilutes gradually. Freeze water in a loaf pan or bowl; cubes will water the punch down unevenly and fast.
- YieldTwo quarts of juice with four and a half pounds of sugar dissolved into it, plus the pint of lemon syrup, comes to something closer to four quarts of syrup, so about eight quarts once cut with an equal volume. The syrup keeps several weeks refrigerated in a clean bottle.
This comes from a temperance-era collection of alcohol-free drinks — "Uncle Sam's water wagon" being the period joke about being on the wagon — published when the movement toward national Prohibition was gathering force and hostesses needed punch bowls that would offend nobody. Unfermented grape juice was central to that project: pasteurized bottled juice, generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch's work in the 1860s on a communion wine substitute, was by 1900 widely available and sold to church and temperance households as the respectable stand-in for wine. Blackberries, meanwhile, were a hedgerow and kitchen-garden fruit that many households could gather for themselves, and their juice was already a fixture of home medicine chests in the form of blackberry cordial and syrup. Sweetening on this scale was normal practice for fruit juices, where sugar flavors and gives body to the syrup.