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Cranford Punch
Peel the yellow rinds from three lemons, add with the juice to one half cup of sugar and one quart of water. Boil for five minutes, strain, and cool. Add two cups of tea and an equal amount of any kind of fruit juice. When ready to serve, pour over ice and add a bottle of Vichy. Decorate with fresh fruit.
A temperance punch built on a lemon syrup base, thinned with tea and fruit juice and finished with sparkling mineral water. Everything but the fizz can be made a day ahead.
- The hinge: boil the syrup, not the juiceThe hinge: what goes into the boil -- As written, the rind and the juice both go into the sugar and water and get the full five minutes; the pared rind is where the oil comes from. Lemon juice held at a boil turns flat and slightly bitter, so if you want the brightest result, depart from the original and stir the juice in off the heat, straining once it has cooled.
- Pare, do not zest into the pot"Yellow rinds" means the coloured layer only, taken off in wide strips with a peeler. Any white pith carried along will make the finished syrup bitter over the day it sits.
- VichyVichy was a sparkling mineral table water from central France, sold in American groceries and drugstores; a good deal of what was labelled "vichy" in the United States was domestic artificially carbonated water of the same style. Bottle sizes varied, so treat "a bottle" as an approximation: use about 2 to 3 cups of any plain seltzer or mineral water, added at the last moment.
- Two cups of teaThe recipe does not say which tea; ordinary brewed black tea, cooled, at drinking strength rather than concentrate is the safe reading. Brew it short, around three minutes, since tannin that tastes fine hot turns harsh once the drink is cold and sweet.
- "Any kind of fruit juice"Two cups is a large proportion, so the choice sets the character: white grape or pineapple for a mild punch, raspberry or cherry for colour, orange for something closer to lemonade. Avoid anything with added sweetener until you have tasted the mix.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to a quart of water is light against many period punch recipes, and the tea and seltzer both dilute further. Taste before the ice goes in and add syrup rather than dry sugar if it needs lifting.
- YieldAbout two and a half to three quarts once the seltzer is in, or roughly sixteen to twenty small punch-cup servings. Chill the base thoroughly first; pouring warm syrup over ice waters the whole bowl down.
Books of this kind belong to the long American temperance campaign, which by the early twentieth century had produced whole collections of "unfermented" punches, cups and cordials designed to fill the same bowl on the same sideboard as the alcoholic versions they replaced. The strategy is visible in the ingredients: tea for body and a faint astringency where wine would have been, and a bottled sparkling mineral water for the lift that champagne once gave. Vichy, along with Apollinaris and domestic waters, was widely sold in the United States at the time and was a standard temperance substitute in punch recipes. The origin of the name Cranford is not documented.