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Hillcrest Punch
Boil one and one half cups of sugar and one cup of water for ten minutes. Cool, and add the juice of eight oranges, five lemons, one cup each of raspberry syrup and grated pineapple, and one cup of tea. Serve in a punch bowl with plenty of ice and one quart of Apollinaris.
A straightforward syrup-and-citrus punch whose only real trick is timing: the sparkling water goes in at the last possible moment, at the bowl, or the whole thing is flat before the first glass is poured.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, widely exported and a fixture of pre-Prohibition bars. Any dry sparkling mineral water works; a quart is about 4 cups.
- Boil the syrup ten minutes, no longerBoil the syrup ten minutes -- One and a half cups sugar to one cup water boiled for ten minutes gives a heavy syrup. Keep the heat moderate and watch it; boiled harder or longer it thickens further and can begin to colour.
- Citrus yieldsEight oranges give roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of juice, five lemons about 3/4 cup. Oranges vary a good deal in size and sweetness, so taste before serving and hold back some of the syrup if it is cloying.
- Raspberry syrupNot a modern coffee-bar syrup but a thick sweetened fruit syrup, essentially strained raspberry preserve. A good bottled raspberry cordial or sirop de framboise stands in; avoid anything labelled raspberry-flavoured.
- The teaA cup of plain black tea, brewed at ordinary drinking strength and cooled. Brewed too long or too strong it turns the punch bitter and muddy.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple grated on a coarse grater, juice and all. Crushed canned pineapple is the closest equivalent, though it is sweeter, which is another reason to taste before adding all the syrup.
- Assembly and iceCombine everything except the mineral water and chill it thoroughly; a warm base plus ice means a watery punch. Use one large block or a few very large pieces rather than cubes so it dilutes slowly.
- YieldRoughly 3 quarts once the mineral water is in — about twenty punch-cup servings, or a dozen in tumblers.
The formula here is a standard fruit punch of the era: a boiled sugar syrup for body, orange and lemon for acid, a fruit syrup for colour, a cup of tea for what may well be the astringency that alcohol would otherwise have supplied, and imported sparkling mineral water for lift. Apollinaris was the prestige bottle of the period, advertised in America as the Queen of Table Waters, and calling for it by name in a recipe signalled the same thing that naming a brand of champagne once had. Names like Hillcrest may have been attached to a hotel, a country club or simply a pleasant-sounding invention, though how such punches were distinguished from the dozens beside them in the same chapter is not something the recipe itself records.