Home › Recipes › Angelica Punch
Angelica Punch
2 cups California Angelica wine. 2 cups hot water--a pint. 1 cup sugar--1/2 pound. 1 cup stemmed raisins--1/2 pound. 1 lemon. 2 whites of eggs and two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar to beat in.
Chop the raisins, grate half the rind of the lemon, squeeze in all of the juice, pour the hot water to them, add the sugar, and stir until it is all dissolved. Strain the flavored syrup thus obtained into a freezer, and rub the most of the raisin pulp through as well. Add the wine and freeze. When nearly frozen whip the two whites and the powdered sugar together till thick, add them to the punch and finish freezing. It is like cream. Serve in stem glasses.
A frozen wine punch of the kind served mid-meal in late nineteenth-century American dining. The method is sound ice-cream practice, but the finishing step puts raw egg white into a product that is never heated.
- Why the cautionThe two whites are whipped with sugar and folded into the punch cold, then frozen. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves rather than destroys it. Alcohol at the strength of a diluted dessert wine, and sugar at this concentration, do not pasteurize anything either.
- The dilution mattersTwo cups of wine are stretched with two cups of water plus juice and syrup, so the finished punch is well under half the strength of the wine. Any notion that the alcohol makes the raw white safe does not hold. Use a current recipe if you want a frozen punch of this type.
- Angelica wineA sweet fortified white wine, historically made in California from Mission grapes and stopped with brandy while still very sugary. It is still produced in small quantities but is not a supermarket item; the recipe leans on its sweetness as well as its alcohol.
- The measuresThe book helpfully doubles its own cups: a pint of hot water, half a pound of sugar, half a pound of raisins. The water equivalence puts the cup at the standard 8 fl oz; the half-pound figures for sugar and raisins follow the old pint's-a-pound rule of thumb rather than exact weight.
- "Freezer"Here this means a hand-cranked ice-and-salt churn, not an appliance. The constant scraping and beating are what produce the texture the author describes as "like cream"; a still-frozen mixture of this composition would set hard and grainy.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a quarter to a quart and a half before the whites are folded in, more after. Served in stem glasses as a mid-dinner course, that is perhaps eight to twelve small portions rather than dessert servings.
Frozen punch belongs to the long formal dinner of the late Victorian table, where a small iced glass of wine, citrus and sugar was served between the heavy courses to mark a pause; Roman punch, made with rum and often with meringue beaten in much as here, was the best-known version. This one is a California book's answer to that convention: Angelica, a sweet fortified wine generally traced to the Mission-grape vineyards around Los Angeles and whose name is traditionally linked to that city, was cheap and abundant on the West Coast and gave the punch its sweetness without any imported spirit. The raisins are doing double work, adding body and a second layer of grape flavour, and rubbing their pulp through into the freezer thickens the ice without cream or custard.