Home › Recipes › Cardinal Punch
Cardinal Punch
A survival of the old--time spiced wine called "bishop;" the same was called cardinal when made with the best of red wine. The specialty about it is in roasting the oranges either before or over the fire, and letting them steep in good red wine, which, when thus flavored, is used either hot or cold. If to be frozen take 1 quart of wine jelly (calf's foot or gelatine.) 1 quart of claret or any good red wine. 1 quart of port. 1 quart of water. 2 pounds of sugar. 4 oranges. 2 tablespoonfuls of whole cloves.
Bake the oranges brown on a plate in the oven. Make a boiling syrup of the sugar and water with the cloves in it, drop the baked oranges into it, add the wine and let remain until cold. Cut the oranges and press them for the juice, and strain the punch into the freezer. Add the jelly (or white of eggs for a substitute) and freeze. If in season for red raspberry juice add some for brighter color.
A frozen punch of the sort served mid-dinner rather than at the end, and one that will fight you in a modern ice cream machine because of the alcohol. Read the notes on freezing before you start.
- Roasting the orangesThis is the step the recipe itself calls the specialty, and it is not decorative: baking whole oranges until the skins brown caramelises the peel oils and gives the punch its bitter-sweet backbone. The book gives no temperature or time; bake them on a plate in a hot oven until the skins are blistered and dark in patches, and use the juices that run out.
- Wine jelly and calf's foot"Wine jelly (calf's foot or gelatine)" means a quart of already-set sweet jelly, not liquid. Calf's foot jelly is a homemade gelatine stock, long gone from most kitchens; a quart of firm gelatine-set wine jelly does the same job of giving body so the frozen punch is smooth rather than a block of ice shards.
- The egg-white substituteThe whites are folded in raw and never cooked, which is a real risk. Use the gelatine jelly as the recipe's first choice, or pasteurised whites if you want the aerated version.
- It will not freeze hardTwo quarts of wine (plus whatever is in the wine jelly) and two pounds of sugar in roughly a gallon of liquid depress the freezing point a long way. Period cooks used an ice-and-rock-salt bucket freezer and churned constantly. Expect a slush or spoonable granita from modern equipment, and churn it in batches.
- ClovesTwo tablespoons of whole cloves in a gallon is assertive by current taste. Steeping them in the boiling syrup and then through the cooling wine extracts a great deal; a tablespoon is closer to modern palates, and they must be strained out completely.
- StrainingStrain twice, once through a sieve to remove cloves and orange pulp and again through muslin. Pulp and clove fragments freeze into gritty specks that no amount of churning will smooth.
- Yield and serviceAbout a gallon before freezing, which is roughly twenty to twenty-four small glasses. Serve in stemmed glasses as a between-courses ice, not as a dessert portion.
- Raspberry juiceThe colour note is real: claret and port freeze to a dull brownish purple. Fresh red raspberry juice, strained, restores the cardinal red the name is meant to advertise.
"Bishop" was a hot spiced wine drink well established in England by the eighteenth century, built on port and roasted oranges stuck with cloves, and it belonged to a small ecclesiastical family of punches that German drinking tradition set out most clearly: Bischof of red wine, Kardinal of white or Rhine wine, Papst of Tokay. This book reverses the colour convention and defines cardinal as the version made with the best red wine, which tells you the naming was always loose and local. What is distinctly late-nineteenth-century is the instruction to freeze it. Frozen punches were a fixture of formal dinners in the 1880s and 1890s, served midway through the meal to clear the palate before the roast.