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Tutti Frutti Punch
Stone one cup of cherries and cut in halves, one grated pineapple, one pint mashed strawberries, and one small glass of Bar-le-duc jelly. Put in a large bowl and sprinkle with a generous amount of powdered sugar, a bit of nutmeg, and the grated rind of one orange. Put in ice box for several hours to chill thoroughly. Make a syrup by boiling for ten minutes, three cups of sugar and a quart of water. When cool add one half pint of lemon juice and one cucumber peeled and cut in dice. Mix the fruit with the syrup and pour over a large piece of ice in the punch bowl. Garnish with cherries and sprigs of rosemary.
A large-format fruit punch from the first years of national Prohibition, built on a boiled sugar syrup and several hours of maceration. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions are for a party and a few of the ingredients need translating.
- Bar-le-duc jellyA soft redcurrant preserve from Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, traditionally with the seeds picked out by hand so the whole berries stay suspended. A good seedless redcurrant jelly is the closest substitute; "a small glass" is imprecise, but a wine-glass measure of this period is usually taken as about 2 oz, or a quarter cup.
- Half a pint of lemon juiceOne cup, which is the juice of six to eight lemons. It is the whole acid backbone of the punch, so use fresh juice and add it only after the syrup has cooled or you will cook off the aroma.
- The cucumber is not a mistakeDiced or sliced cucumber turns up as an aromatic in punches and cups of this period, valued for a clean green note rather than for eating. Seed it, dice it small, and let it steep in the cool syrup; strain it out before serving if you would rather not have it in the cups.
- Grated pineappleOne medium pineapple, peeled, cored and grated or pulsed to a coarse pulp with its juice, gives about two cups. Canned crushed pineapple in juice works, but drain off some of the packing syrup or the punch turns cloying.
- The maceration is the hingeThe sugaring and chilling of the fruit is not just a cooling step. The powdered sugar draws juice out of the strawberries and cherries, and the nutmeg and orange rind need those hours to bloom into it. Do not shortcut it to thirty minutes.
- Boiling the syrupThree cups sugar to a quart of water boiled ten minutes reduces to a light syrup, around five cups. Stir until the sugar dissolves before it reaches a boil so it does not crystallise on the pan sides, and cool it completely.
- A large piece of iceA single block, not cubes, so it chills without watering the punch down within the hour. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a bowl the day before. Modern cubes melt fast enough to turn this thin by the second round.
- Yield and dilutionAbout three quarts before ice, or roughly twenty to twenty-four punch cups. It is sweet and concentrated by design; many will prefer it lengthened with chilled still or sparkling water at the bowl.
- Rosemary garnishRosemary sprigs were a decorative flourish rather than a flavouring here. If you want the herb to register, bruise a sprig into the cooling syrup and remove it before mixing.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small flood of temperance drink books published around the arrival of national Prohibition, when American hostesses who had always served claret cup and champagne punch needed something to put in the same bowl. The answer, repeatedly, was fruit: syrups, lemon juice, and whatever was in season, built at party scale and served over a block of ice with the ceremony of the old alcoholic punches intact. Tutti frutti is simply Italian for "all fruits," a name attached in the nineteenth century to anything mixing several kinds at once, from ice cream to preserved fruit in brandy. The Bar-le-duc jelly is the tell of an expensive table: the seeded redcurrant preserve from that Lorraine town is traditionally said to date to the medieval period, and the pips are removed with a goose quill; by 1900 it was an imported delicacy sold in small jars in American groceries. The diced cucumber, which reads oddly now, is a direct inheritance from Victorian cup recipes, where cucumber peel was a routine aromatic in claret and cider cups.