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Harvard Punch
Cook one quart of cranberries in one quart of boiling water until soft. Strain, and when cool pour over a large piece of ice in a punch bowl. Add two thirds of a cup of orange juice, three tablespoonfuls of lemon juice, and one cup of sugar, or more, according to taste. Stir until sugar is dissolved and dilute with ice water or Apollinaris.
A clear cranberry punch that depends on two things: not muddying the juice, and not diluting it too fast. Both are easy to get wrong.
- A quart of cranberriesBerries in books of this period were commonly measured by volume rather than weight. One quart is about 4 cups; a standard 12-oz bag runs about 3 cups, so a bag plus a further cup.
- Strain, don't pressLet the cooked berries drain through a sieve or jelly bag under their own weight. Pushing the pulp through gives a cloudy, slightly gritty punch, which is exactly what the "strain" here is meant to avoid.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, widely sold in America before 1914 and still the default posh fizzy water when this book was written. Club soda or any dry sparkling mineral water does the same job.
- Dissolve the sugar firstA cup of granulated sugar will not go into cold juice over ice without a good deal of stirring. Stir it into the cranberry liquid while still warm, then chill — the instruction to "stir until sugar is dissolved" assumes patience the recipe does not otherwise supply.
- The large piece of iceA single block, not cubes. Freeze water in a loaf pan or plastic tub the day before. Cubes have far more surface area and will water the punch down much faster.
- Add the fizz at the tableIf you are diluting with Apollinaris rather than ice water, pour it in just before serving and stir once. Carbonation stirred into a bowl of ice is gone in minutes.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half before dilution; the recipe fixes no quantity of ice water or Apollinaris, so the finished volume and servings depend on how far you take the dilution.
The name Harvard Punch reflects a common convention of the period, in which non-alcoholic punches borrowed the prestige of colleges, clubs and hotels — crimson being Harvard's color, cranberry juice was the obvious base, and the pairing is generally traced to that color association rather than to any documented origin at the college. Cranberries themselves were a New England commercial crop by this date, cultivated in the bogs of Cape Cod and shipped nationally, which is why a Boston-leaning household book could call for a quart of them without comment. The specification of Apollinaris rather than plain soda water suggests something of the era's table manners: imported mineral water was what you put in front of guests.