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Yale Punch
Take one cup of sugar and pour over it one cup of hot tea. When the sugar is dissolved, add three quarters of a cup of orange juice, and one third of a cup of lemon juice. Strain through a fine sieve over a large piece of ice in a punch bowl, and before serving pour in one pint of ginger ale and one pint of Apollinaris. Decorate with slices of orange.
A temperance punch built on a hot-tea syrup, which dissolves the sugar without cooking and carries a little tannin into the finished drink. Nothing here is difficult; the only things that will sink it are flat carbonation and a diluting handful of ice cubes.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water from the Ahr valley, once sold everywhere in the United States and still available. Any dry, strongly carbonated mineral water substitutes directly — a pint is two cups.
- The teaThe recipe says only "hot tea"; ordinary black tea at drinking strength rather than a concentrate is the likely intent. Steep it about three minutes; a long steep gives a bitter, astringent edge that citrus will not cover.
- Ice block, not cubesThe "large piece of ice" is the point. Freeze water in a loaf tin or plastic container for a single mass that chills the bowl without watering the punch down as cubes do.
- Add the fizz lastPour in the ginger ale and mineral water immediately before serving, as written. Mixed in early they go flat, and the drink becomes a sweet-sour fruit cup.
- Citrus quantitiesThree quarters of a cup of orange juice is roughly two to three oranges; a third of a cup of lemon juice is two lemons. Squeeze and strain rather than using bottled juice, which reads as cooked against the fresh syrup.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar to about two cups of juice and tea is period-typical and will taste noticeably sweet once diluted. Ginger ale adds more sugar still; taste after the syrup stage and hold back some of it if you prefer a drier punch.
- YieldAbout six cups of liquid plus ice, or roughly ten to twelve punch-cup servings. Double or triple it for a proper bowl.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a genre that flourished in the years around national Prohibition: collections of "soft" drinks meant to fill the same social role as the alcoholic punch bowl. Hence the name — a college punch, associated with Yale, but here rendered in fruit juice, tea and mineral water, the temperance movement borrowing the prestige of the club and campus while removing the spirits. Apollinaris water, the imported German sparkling water advertised for decades as the "Queen of Table Waters," was the marker of a fashionable non-alcoholic drink in this period, and its appearance in a recipe like this signals aspiration as much as flavor. Punches named for colleges were common in early twentieth-century American drink books, and the attributions are generally traditional rather than documented; the connection to any particular institution is loose.