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Christmas Punch
Boil two cups of sugar in one cup of water, and cool. Mix the juice of six oranges, six lemons, and the pulp and juice of two grapefruits, one grated pineapple, or one can of preserved pineapple, and one cup of strong tea. Sweeten with sugar syrup and chill in the ice box. When ready to serve, pour into the punch bowl. Add a large piece of ice and four quarts of ice water. Garnish with cherries or oranges sliced.
A straightforward non-alcoholic fruit punch built on a sugar syrup base. The only real judgement calls are how much syrup goes back in and how the ice is handled.
- Sweeten to taste, not by ruleThe syrup — 2 cups sugar boiled in 1 cup water, which yields roughly 2 cups of heavy syrup — is made separately and added back at your discretion. Modern citrus is often sweeter than the fruit of the book's period, so add half, taste after the water goes in, and adjust.
- Dilution is the hingeFour quarts of ice water goes into something over two quarts of juice concentrate. That is a lot of dilution for a punch bowl standing through a long party, and it tastes thin if you also use crushed ice. Hold back a quart of the water and let the melting block make up the difference.
- "A large piece of ice"A single block, not cubes, so it melts slowly. Freeze water in a loaf pan, a bundt pan or a plastic container the day before; a block that size will outlast cubes by hours.
- Grated pineappleMeans fresh pineapple shredded on a box grater, flesh and juice together. A can of crushed pineapple in juice, about 20 oz, is the direct substitute. "Preserved pineapple" of the period was packed in heavy syrup, so if you use that, cut the added sugar syrup accordingly.
- The teaOne cup of strong tea adds tannin and backbone. Brew it at about double normal strength and cool it before mixing.
- Ice boxAn ice-cooled cabinet; use the refrigerator. Chill the concentrate at least two hours.
- YieldRoughly five and a half quarts before the ice melts, which is about forty 4-oz punch cups or twenty tumblers.
- GrapefruitTwo grapefruits, pulp and all, gives noticeable bitterness. The grapefruit varieties in general trade then were probably sharper and less sweet than modern red ones, so a modern batch may read sweeter and milder.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance drink literature that flourished in the years before and during national Prohibition, when hostesses needed a full repertoire of things to fill a punch bowl that were not punch in the older, spirituous sense. "On the water wagon" was already common slang for abstaining, and the book's title makes the joke plainly. The recipe itself is a fossil of the older form: a genuine punch was historically built on spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice, and what survives here is everything but the spirit. The heavy reliance on oranges, lemons, grapefruit and canned pineapple reflects a specific moment in American food supply, when refrigerated rail cars and Florida and California groves had made winter citrus ordinary enough for a Christmas table, and Hawaiian canned pineapple was a well-established and heavily advertised product.