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Indian Punch
1 quart water, 1 lb. sugar, grated rind 1 lemon, boil 5 minutes. Juice 3 lemons, 2 cups orange pekoe tea, strain. 1 tsp. vanilla, 1 tsp. almond extract. Add all together and put in fruit cans near the ice to cool. When cold and ready to serve, add 1 pint Appolinaris water, or plain water. The above makes 2 quarts.
A cold tea punch built on a lemon syrup — straightforward to make, with a few period terms worth translating.
- Apollinaris waterA German sparkling mineral water, widely sold in America around 1900 and a common mixer. Any plain seltzer or club soda does the same job; the recipe already concedes plain water as a substitute.
- Fruit cans, near the iceGlass canning jars used simply as covered containers, set beside the block in an icebox. Mason jars or any lidded pitcher in the refrigerator work identically; chill at least four hours.
- 2 cups orange pekoe teaThis means brewed tea, not leaves. Orange pekoe is a leaf grade, not a flavor — any decent black tea works. Brew it at ordinary drinking strength, around 4 to 5 minutes; longer steeping turns the punch bitter once it is sweetened and chilled.
- The syrupA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. Boiling it with a quart of water and the lemon zest for 5 minutes extracts the rind oils and gives the punch its body. Strain the zest out before combining.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon in two quarts is assertive by current taste. Start with half and add to taste.
- Order of operationsLet the syrup cool before adding the lemon juice, tea and extracts — heat drives off the vanilla and almond aromatics and dulls fresh citrus. Add the sparkling water only at the moment of serving.
- YieldTwo quarts, or roughly twelve to sixteen punch-cup servings. Doubling is trivial; the syrup keeps a week refrigerated.
Philathea cookbooks were fundraisers for the Philathea classes — young women's Bible study groups that spread through Baptist and other Protestant Sunday schools in the early twentieth century, paired with the men's Baraca classes. That context explains the punch bowl without a bottle in it: church-society entertaining of the period was firmly temperance, and the cold tea punch was the workhorse of the reception table, the missionary tea and the church social. Sweetened iced tea flavored with citrus was still a comparatively new fashion in American entertaining, generally traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century. The Apollinaris water is the tell of a hostess with some pretension — imported German mineral water was a genteel touch, and the recipe's shrug toward "or plain water" acknowledges that not every kitchen had a case of it.