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Bonanza Punch
Our own Rocky Mountain punch as made for hotel dinners for two hundred and fifty. 10 quarts of water. 9 pounds of sugar. 2 dozen lemons. 6 oranges. 2 cans of pineapple. 1 pint of gin. 1 quart bottle of champagne. Grate the rinds of 6 of the lemons and 4 oranges into a bowl, and squeeze in the juice of all. Put on about 2 quarts of water, with a lot of sugar in, and the pineapple juice, making a hot syrup of it, and then pour it to the grated rinds and juice in the bowl to draw the flavor. Strain into the freezer, chop the pineapple and put in, add all the rest of the sugar and water, gin and champagne, color it pink and freeze.
This is a frozen punch for a banquet of 250, churned in an ice cream freezer and served as a slushy intermezzo rather than drunk from a glass. Two things govern it: the sugar level and the point at which the alcohol goes in.
- Scale it downDivided by ten it comes to 1 quart water, about 14 oz sugar, 2 to 3 lemons, half an orange or so, a small can of pineapple, 3 tablespoons gin and about 3 oz champagne. That fills a 2-quart ice cream machine and gives roughly 25 small servings.
- "The freezer"In period hotel usage this is a hand-cranked ice-and-salt churn, not a deep freeze. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- Sugar is structuralNine pounds to ten quarts sounds punishing, but sugar and alcohol together keep the mixture from setting into a solid block. Cutting the sugar substantially will give you a brick rather than a spoonable ice.
- Alcohol lastThe gin and champagne go in at the end. Both alcohol and sugar depress the freezing point, though at this dilution the sugar does most of the work; expect a soft slush rather than a firm ice.
- "A lot of sugar" is genuinely vagueThe instruction to make the hot syrup with "a lot of sugar" out of the nine pounds is not specified. Use roughly a third of the total for the syrup and stir the rest into the cold liquid until dissolved.
- Canned pineapple then and nowPeriod cans were packed in heavy syrup, which was part of the sweetening. Juice-packed fruit is standard now, so taste before adding the last of the sugar rather than after.
- Zest without pithGrate only the colored layer of the six lemons and four oranges. The hot syrup poured over the zest is an oil extraction, and any white pith caught in it will turn the punch bitter as it steeps.
- "Color it pink"The pink in a hotel kitchen of this date would most likely have come from cochineal or carmine. A few tablespoons of cranberry, hibiscus or raspberry juice does the same work now without altering the flavor much.
Frozen punches like this belong to the long multi-course dinner, where a spoonful of iced spirit-laced fruit ice was served midway through as a palate cleanser — the same slot occupied by Roman punch on nineteenth-century American menus. "Rocky Mountain punch" was already a fixed name in the bartending literature by the 1860s, appearing in Jerry Thomas's bar guide, though there it is an iced bowl punch rather than a frozen one; the pastry cook has taken the name and sent it through the ice cream freezer. "Bonanza" is the language of the Western mining strikes, and the word had come to suggest a windfall or run of great wealth, which suits a recipe written for two hundred and fifty covers. The quantities here — ten quarts of water carrying a single bottle of champagne — show how the expensive ingredient functioned in hotel work: enough to name on the menu, spread thin enough to price.