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Strawberry Punch
Prepare strawberry syrup as directed for strawberry ice and add to it a pint of sweet wine and freeze. Color bright rose.
A frozen punch rather than an ice cream, meant to be served soft and spoonable. The one thing to understand before starting is that the wine is what makes it work, and also what makes it never quite set hard.
- The missing half of the recipeEverything depends on the strawberry syrup from the book's strawberry ice entry, which is presumably a sweetened, strained strawberry preparation. You cannot follow this page without turning back to that entry; failing that, a plausible modern stand-in is about 1 quart crushed ripe strawberries pressed through a sieve with 1 pound sugar dissolved in 1 pint water, combined and chilled -- but the proportions are a guess, not the book's.
- A pint of sweet wineA pint is 2 cups. "Sweet wine" in a book of this sort would most likely have meant something like sherry, Madeira, Marsala or a sweet Muscat rather than anything sparkling, though the text does not say. Choose one with some acidity; a cloying wine plus strawberry syrup gives a flat result.
- Why it will not freeze firmAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so 2 cups of wine will tend to keep a batch of this kind slushy and coarse however long you churn, and that soft texture is very likely what was wanted. If your mixture is still soupy after 30 minutes in a machine, transfer it to the freezer for an hour and rake it with a fork.
- "Freeze" meant a salt-and-ice churnThe original presumably assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt. A modern ice cream machine works, but pre-chill the mixture to refrigerator temperature first or the alcohol will slow freezing badly.
- Bright roseThe colouring available at the time would have been cochineal or a coal-tar dye. Cooked strawberry syrup dulls and browns as it stands, so if you want the colour without additives, use raw strained berries and a spoonful of lemon juice, which keeps the pigment red. A little beet juice will also redden it, though it carries some earthy flavour of its own.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantity for the syrup, so the yield depends entirely on the strawberry ice entry it points back to. It reads more as a palate course than a dessert: serve in chilled stemmed glasses, a small portion each, and eat it within minutes of scooping.
Frozen punches of this kind belong to the formal multi-course dinner, where a wine-spiked ice was served between the heavy roast and the game or salad to reset the palate. The best-known member of the family is Roman punch, made with rum and often lightened with meringue; strawberry punch is the summer variant, leaning on fruit syrup for both colour and sweetness. Pastry cooks in hotels and catering kitchens presumably kept a stock of fruit syrups on hand, so that a punch, an ice, a sherbet or a soda could be pulled from the same base, which would explain why this entry can be three sentences long and simply point back to the strawberry ice. The instruction to "color bright rose" is a reminder that these dishes were judged first by eye on a long table of glassware, and that artificial colouring was then an unremarkable part of the professional confectioner's kit.