Roman Punch
2 pounds of sugar. 3 pints of water. 5 or 6 lemons--juice of all, zest of 3. 3 or 4 oranges--juice of all, zest of 1. 8 whites of eggs. Half pint of Jamaica rum. Half pint of angelica or other sweet wine.
Grate the rinds of 3 or 4 of the lemons and 1 or 2 oranges, according to their size and ripeness, into a bowl and squeeze in the juice of all without the seeds. Make a hot syrup of the sugar and a pint of water, and when it has cooled a little pour it to the zests and juice, and let remain till cold. Add the wine and the other two pints of water, strain into a freezer, freeze, add the whipped whites, and a few minutes before serving put in the rum and beat to mix. 2. To make a more expensive quality of punch use good French white wine instead of water, except water enough to dissolve the sugar. Rub the orange and lemon zests on lumps of sugar and the flavored syrup made with it need not be made hot. A larger number of lemons will be needed, and the rum is to be added at last as in the other case.
This is a frozen punch of the sort served between courses at long nineteenth-century dinners. The technique is sound, but one step puts it outside what a modern kitchen should serve.
- The raw egg whites are the problemEight whites are whipped and folded into the churning punch, and nothing in the recipe ever brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The hot syrup is poured onto the zest and juice and allowed to go cold before the whites appear, so it does no sanitising work at all.
- Freezing does not make it safeChilling and freezing suspend bacterial growth rather than destroying it; whatever is present in the whites when they go into the freezer is still present when the punch is served. This was a dish specifically aimed at dinner guests, served without further cooking.
- The alcohol is far too dilute to helpHalf a pint of rum and half a pint of sweet wine in roughly two and a half quarts of liquid gives a very low final strength, and most of it is added minutes before serving. Alcohol at that concentration and contact time is not a sanitiser.
- If you want to make frozen punchUse a current recipe built around pasteurised egg white or a meringue cooked to temperature. That is a different recipe, and the substitution is not a small edit to this one.
- Reading the rest of itThe "freezer" here is a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a canister set in a bucket of ice and salt. "Angelica" is a sweet fortified wine from California, once common and now made only in small quantities; any sweet white fortified wine occupied the same slot. Jamaica rum meant dark, heavily flavoured pot-still rum, not a light mixing rum.
- ScaleTwo pounds of sugar and three pints of water, plus the wine, make a large batch by modern standards. Roman punch was served in small glasses as a palate course, so this quantity would yield a considerable number of servings.
Roman punch was one of the standard intermezzo courses of the elaborate nineteenth-century dinner: a half-frozen, spirituous ice handed round in small glasses partway through the meal, generally understood as a pause and a palate-cleanser before the roast. The origin of the name is obscure; by the mid-1800s it simply denoted a rum-and-citrus water ice lightened with beaten egg white, and it appears in American, English and French service manuals alike. It became notorious as a way of serving liquor at supposedly temperate tables, and is often said to have been offered at White House dinners under exactly that cover.