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Raspberry Punch
Boil one half cup of sugar with one cup of water for five minutes. When cool add one cup of Raspberry Shrub, one cup of club soda, one half cup of orange juice, one fourth cup of lemon juice, one half cup of tea, and one half cup of pineapple syrup. Pour over large piece of ice in punch bowl, and serve when thoroughly chilled.
A simple assembly job whose only real difficulty is that two of its six ingredients no longer mean what they did. Everything hinges on the shrub.
- Raspberry shrubIn this period a shrub is a sweetened fruit syrup soured with vinegar — raspberries steeped in cider vinegar, strained, then boiled with sugar — and it is what gives this punch its edge. A modern seedless raspberry syrup or preserve thinned with water will work but tastes flat by comparison; add a teaspoon or two of cider vinegar to approximate the original.
- Pineapple syrupNot juice. It means the sweet packing syrup drained from canned pineapple, or a pineapple-flavoured soda-fountain syrup. Canned pineapple in juice is the closest common substitute; if you use fresh juice, expect the punch to read noticeably less sweet.
- The teaUnspecified, though a plain black tea is the likely intent, contributing tannin and body more than flavour. Brew it strong and cool it fully — warm tea will melt the ice and thin the punch before it reaches the glass.
- Add the soda lastThe recipe lists club soda among the cool ingredients, but pour it in immediately before serving, over the ice. Mixed in early it goes flat while the punch chills.
- Sugar syrupHalf a cup of sugar to one cup of water boiled five minutes yields roughly three-quarters to one cup of thin syrup, depending on how hard it boils. Stir until dissolved before it comes to the boil so no crystals cling to the pan sides.
- The block of iceA large single piece, not cubes, is deliberate: it chills slowly and dilutes little over a long service. Freeze water in a loaf pan or plastic container the day before.
- YieldAbout 4 1/2 cups before ice, give or take depending on how far the syrup reduced; roughly six to eight punch-cup servings. Double or triple it for a party; the proportions scale without adjustment.
Temperance cookbooks and drink pamphlets proliferated in the United States in the run-up to and through Prohibition. The recipes are less about inventing new drinks than about proving that a punch bowl could hold the centre of a party without spirits, which is why so much work is done here by acid — orange, lemon, vinegar-soured shrub — and by tea, whose tannin supplies some of the grip that wine or brandy would otherwise have given. Shrubs themselves are older than the temperance movement, generally traced to the era when vinegar was a practical way to keep summer fruit through the winter; the same syrups were a staple of the soda fountain, which flourished in the same period.