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Currant Punch (Mash one pint of red)
Mash one pint of red raspberries and one quart of ripe currants in a preserving kettle, adding two quarts of cold water and two cups of granulated sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and bring slowly to the boiling point. Remove from the fire and strain. When cool pour into a punch bowl over a large piece of ice, and serve in small glasses with a few fresh raspberries. More sugar may be added if desired.
A straightforward cooked fruit syrup diluted into a punch, from an era when the punch bowl was the centerpiece of an afternoon reception. The whole thing takes twenty minutes plus chilling.
- Preserving kettleThis means a wide, heavy, non-reactive pot — originally enameled iron or copper. Any large stainless or enameled Dutch oven works. Avoid bare aluminum or cast iron, which react with currant acid and dull both color and flavor.
- Bring slowly to the boil, then stopThe hinge of the recipe. The moment it reaches a boil, pull it off. Red currants and raspberries lose their fresh perfume with sustained cooking, and long boiling only concentrates and thickens the liquid, giving a syrupy rather than a drinkable punch.
- StrainingA fine sieve is enough if you want body and color; a jelly bag or double layer of cheesecloth gives a clearer punch. Do not press the pulp hard through the cloth if you want clarity — let it drip.
- Finding currantsFresh red currants are scarce in much of the United States, a legacy of the early twentieth-century bans on Ribes planting to check white pine blister rust. Frozen currants work here; a quart of fresh is roughly a pound.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to two quarts of water and about two pounds of fruit is restrained by period standards, and red currants are sharply acidic. Taste after straining and while still warm, when sugar dissolves readily, rather than adding it to the cold bowl.
- The block of iceA single large piece was used because it melts slowly and does not water down the bowl. A quart container or loaf pan of water frozen overnight does the same job; cubes will thin the punch within half an hour.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts before ice, which is roughly 20 of the "small glasses" the recipe intends — punch cups of four ounces, not tumblers.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the temperance literature that flourished in the years before national Prohibition, and its fruit punches are the direct answer to the alcoholic punch bowl they were meant to replace — same bowl, same block of ice, same little cups, no spirits. Currants were an obvious base for such a drink: they were a standard American dooryard fruit in the nineteenth century, ripening in high summer, too tart to eat out of hand and therefore destined for jelly, shrub or cordial. Pairing them with raspberries, which ripen at the same time and supply perfume where the currant supplies acid, was long-standing practice in preserving manuals. Within a couple of decades the fruit itself would become hard to obtain in much of the country, as states moved to eradicate Ribes bushes in defense of the white pine timber industry — one reason a recipe that once assumed a quart of ripe currants on hand now reads as more exotic than it was.