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Columbia Punch
To one quart of cold water, add two cupfuls of sugar and two cupfuls of grated pineapple. Boil for twenty minutes. Then add one half cupful of lemon juice and one cupful of orange juice. When thoroughly cool, strain, and add ice water.
A cooked pineapple syrup thinned with citrus and ice water. The proportions are sound; only the final dilution is left to the cook.
- MeasuresCups and quarts here are the standard US ones: 1 cup is 8 fl oz, 1 quart is 32 fl oz. So the base is 4 cups water, about 14 oz sugar and roughly a pound of grated pineapple.
- Grated pineappleFresh fruit shredded on a box grater, juice and all. A 20 oz tin of crushed pineapple in juice substitutes well, but taste before adding all the sugar, since the packing juice brings sweetness of its own.
- The twenty-minute boilThis is syrup-making, not cooking the fruit for its own sake. Expect some loss of volume and a slightly thicker liquid; a steady simmer rather than a hard rolling boil will keep the sugar from catching.
- Citrus goes in off the heatThe lemon and orange juice are added after boiling. Whatever the original intent, this suits the ingredients: heat drives off the volatile oils that make fresh citrus taste fresh, and a cooked orange note is flat and faintly bitter. Squeeze the juice while the syrup cools.
- StrainingPush the cooled mixture through a fine sieve and press the pulp firmly to get the flavor out. Skipping the strain gives a cloudy punch with fibrous threads that lodge in the teeth.
- The ice water is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. As a starting point, dilute the strained concentrate with an equal volume of ice water and taste; the syrup is sweet enough to take up to twice its volume. Yield therefore varies with how far you dilute it - roughly 3 to 5 quarts from one batch.
- ServingChill the concentrate thoroughly before diluting rather than relying on ice in the bowl, which waters the punch down as it melts. An ice ring frozen from some of the diluted punch keeps the strength constant.
This comes from an American drink book of the Prohibition era, one of a wave of collections published to give hostesses something to serve once the punch bowl could no longer be spiked. Fruit punches like this one carried the load: they use the same ritual vessel and the same ladle as an alcoholic punch, and they lean on sugar, acid and cold to supply the interest that liquor used to. The name may glance at Columbia, the female personification of the United States and a stock patriotic figure of the period, though the book does not say so. Canned pineapple from Hawaii had become widely and cheaply available by this time, but the instruction to grate the fruit points to fresh pineapple being assumed here.