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Lorraine Punch
Take the juice of half a grape fruit, one cup of grape juice, one cup of cider, and four tablespoonfuls of sugar. Mix well, and put in punch bowl with plenty of ice, and when ready to serve add two bottles of Seltzer.
A temperance-era fruit punch built on three sweet juices and cut with fizz at the last minute. The proportions are sound; only the vessels and one ingredient name need translating.
- Cider means sweet ciderIn a Prohibition-era temperance book, cider is unfermented apple juice, not the alcoholic drink the word means in Britain today. Use cloudy unfiltered apple cider or good apple juice.
- Grape juiceThe bottled grape juice of the period was almost always unfermented Concord, dark purple and quite sweet. Concord juice gives the colour and the slightly musky flavour the recipe assumes; a pale white-grape juice will taste thin and look wrong.
- How much is two bottles of SeltzerGenuinely ambiguous. Seltzer was sold both in small individual bottles of roughly half a pint and in charged siphons holding a quart or more, so two bottles could mean anything from 2 cups to 2 quarts. Add it gradually and stop when the punch tastes bright rather than syrupy.
- Half a grapefruitAbout 1/3 cup of juice from a modern fruit, though yields vary considerably. Taste before committing all four tablespoons of sugar.
- Dissolve the sugar firstGranulated sugar dissolves slowly and poorly in cold juice over ice, and what does not dissolve settles, so the last cups come out cloying. Stir it into the grapefruit and grape juice at room temperature, or use an equivalent simple syrup, before the ice goes in.
- Ice and dilutionA large single block or a few big cubes melt far more slowly than small ice and keep the punch from going watery over an hour. The instruction to hold the Seltzer until serving is the hinge of the recipe: added early, the punch is flat by the time the bowl reaches the table.
- YieldWith a quart of seltzer the bowl holds roughly 6 cups of liquid in all; with two quarts, roughly 10. Divide by the size of your punch cups. Scale by keeping the juice base in the same ratio and adjusting fizz to taste.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the small flood of alcohol-free drink books published around the arrival of national Prohibition in the United States, when hostesses who had served claret cup and champagne punch needed something to put in the same bowl. The formula here is typical of the genre: bottled grape juice and sweet cider stand in for wine, and charged water supplies the sparkle that once came from champagne. Bottled unfermented grape juice had been commercially available in America since the late nineteenth century and was closely associated with the temperance movement, which made it the obvious base for punches of this kind. What the name Lorraine refers to is unclear, and whether it points to the French region or is simply a decorative title for the bowl cannot be settled from the recipe itself.