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Kirsch Punch. Romaine
2 quarts of water. 3 pounds of sugar. 4 lemons--juice only. 1 pint of kirschwasser. 8 whites of eggs.
Mix the punch materials together cold; strain into the freezer. When nearly frozen whip the 8 whites firm, mix in and freeze again.
A frozen punch of the sort served between courses at long formal dinners. The method is sound eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ice work, but the finish depends on raw egg white that is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionThe eight whites are whipped and folded into an already-chilled mixture, then frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only suspends it. The pint of kirsch, diluted across better than three quarts of liquid, comes nowhere near a concentration that would sterilise anything. Use a current recipe if you want a punch romaine.
- "The freezer"In a kitchen of this period this normally means the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer: a metal can set in a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand while a dasher scrapes the sides. It is not a compartment of a refrigerator, and the instruction to "freeze again" assumes you can re-pack the bucket with fresh ice and salt.
- KirschwasserA clear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit including the stones, giving it a faint almond bitterness. It is still made and sold under the same name; do not substitute a sweet cherry liqueur, which would throw the sugar balance badly.
- The sugar is structuralThree pounds of sugar to two quarts of water reads as extreme, but sugar and alcohol both depress the freezing point. That is the whole point of a punch romaine: it is meant to stay slushy and spoonable rather than set into a solid block.
- LemonsJuice yield varies a good deal with the size of the fruit. Reckon on measuring roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of juice rather than counting fruit.
- YieldBetter than three and a half quarts before the whites go in, and considerably more after. This is banquet quantity, meant for small stemmed glasses served midway through a dinner of many courses.
Punch romaine belongs to the formal dinner service of the late nineteenth century, where a frozen, lightly alcoholic ice was served between the heavy courses as a sorbet or coup du milieu — a pause meant to settle the palate before the roast arrived. The convention was borrowed from French practice and taken up enthusiastically by American hotel and club kitchens, which is why it turns up in a professional manual like this one. The version made famous by association with the last first-class dinner aboard the Titanic on 14 April 1912 is a relative of this formula, usually with white wine or rum in place of the kirsch. The whipped-white finish, sometimes called an Italian or Roman meringue when sugar syrup is cooked into it, gives the ice its characteristic frothy body; here the whites go in raw, which is the one thing about the recipe that has not aged.