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Regent's Punch
1 quart of water. 1 pint of gin. 2 lemons. 1 pound of sugar. 1 pint of maraschino--or half as much kirsch. 4 bottles of soda water. Grate the rind of a lemon into a bowl, moisten with some gin and rub with the back of a spoon to extract the flavor. Add the lemon juice and rest of the ingredients except the soda; strain into the freezer and freeze as firm as the spirit in it will allow, add the bottled soda and finish the freezing.
This is a frozen punch, meant to be churned in an ice-cream freezer and served as a slush rather than a drink poured over ice. Most of the adaptation is in understanding the equipment and the volumes.
- The hinge: soda goes in lastThe base is frozen first, then the soda water is stirred in and the churning finished. Adding it earlier drives off the gas during the long freeze, which is the whole point of the second stage.
- "The freezer" is a churnIn this period the word means a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, not a modern cabinet freezer. A domestic ice-cream maker does the same job; a still-frozen version in a shallow pan, raked with a fork every 30 minutes, gives a granita texture instead.
- It will never set hard"As firm as the spirit in it will allow" is literal. With a pint of gin and a pint of maraschino in roughly three quarts of liquid, the mixture stays at a soft slush no matter how long you churn. Serve it in glasses with a spoon.
- Bottled soda waterPeriod soda water came in small bottles, far smaller than a modern litre bottle, so four bottles is a modest quantity. Treat it as about 3 cups and adjust to taste.
- MaraschinoThis means the clear, dry-ish Dalmatian cherry-stone liqueur (Luxardo and similar), not the red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. If you substitute kirsch, the recipe's half-quantity is right, since kirsch brings no sugar.
- SugarA pound is about 2 1/4 cups granulated. It dissolves faster if you stir it into the lemon juice and water before the spirits go in; a fully dissolved syrup also churns more smoothly.
- The rubbed rindGrating zest and working it with a spoon in a little spirit is the oleo-saccharum idea applied to alcohol rather than sugar. Give it ten minutes before straining, and strain through a fine sieve or cloth so no zest survives into the freezer.
- YieldAbout three quarts of finished punch, enough for 12 to 16 small servings. It is strong; small cups were the convention.
Regent's Punch is traditionally traced to the household of George IV during his years as Prince Regent, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the name had attached itself to almost any lavishly compounded punch, usually involving tea, champagne, arrack, brandy or rum, and a measure of maraschino. Recipes agree on very little except that the drink should be expensive. What makes this version characteristic of an American pastry cook's book rather than a bartender's is that it is frozen: fashionable dinners of the period broke between the heavy courses with a "Roman punch" or frozen punch, churned in the same freezer used for ices and served in small glasses to reset the palate. Placing it among the recipes of a pastry department, alongside sherbets and water ices, reflects who actually made it in a large kitchen or hotel.