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Metropolitan Punch
Make a quart of strong tea, strain, and cool. Mix the juice of four lemons and one cupful of sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Pour the strained juice into a punch bowl, add the tea and a pint of Apollinaris.
A three-part cold punch — tea, lemon, sparkling water — from the era when a punch bowl had to be filled without spirits. Everything hinges on the tea being steeped properly and then left alone.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, widely sold in America before 1914 and treated as the default fizz. Any dry sparkling mineral water or club soda works; a pint is two cups.
- "Strong tea" means concentrated, not stewedUse about double the usual leaf for a quart of black tea and steep the normal three to five minutes, then strain immediately. Long steeping to gain strength pulls out tannin, and the bitterness is sharpened rather than hidden by the lemon.
- Cool it before it meets the lemonTea can cloud as it cools, and the recipe does say to strain and cool. Chill the strained tea thoroughly in the refrigerator rather than pouring it warm over ice.
- Dissolving the sugarFour lemons give roughly 2/3 cup of juice, which will take a cupful of granulated sugar only with patient stirring. Warming the juice and sugar together briefly, or making a simple syrup from the sugar and a little water, is faster and leaves no grit in the bowl.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar to two-thirds of a cup of juice is a period level of sweet. Taste after the tea goes in and hold some of the syrup back if you want it drier.
- Add the sparkling water lastPour the Apollinaris in at the moment of serving, not while the bowl waits. Stir once, gently — anything more drives off the carbonation the drink is built around.
- IceA single large block or a few big cubes keeps the punch cold without watering it; small ice melts fast and thins the tea within minutes.
- YieldAbout seven cups, or six to eight punch-cup servings. Doubling is straightforward if the tea is brewed strong and chilled ahead.
Books of this kind appeared in quantity in the years around national Prohibition, when hostesses who had always served a spiked punch needed something to put in the same bowl. Tea was the obvious base: cheap, keeps its body when chilled, and carries lemon and sugar the way a light wine does. Apollinaris water was the fashionable sparkling water of the period, advertised as the "Queen of Table Waters," and its appearance in a recipe suggests, though only loosely, a drink of that era. The name attaches to nothing more specific than metropolitan gloss — a plain iced tea punch given a city address.