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The Same, Reduced for Fifty
2 1/2 quarts of water. 2 pounds of sugar, 6 lemons. 2 oranges. 1 small can of pineapple. 1/2 cupful of gin. 1 cupful of champagne or sweet wine.
Grate the rinds of 2 lemons and 1 orange, and proceed as above directed.
This is the scaled-down version of a frozen or iced punch from a hotel manual, written for a cook who already had the full-size formula in front of him. The quantities tell you most of what you need; the missing method is the ordinary one for a punch ice.
- "As above directed""As above directed" points back to the preceding recipe in the book, which is not reproduced here. The usual method for a punch of this kind is rind and sugar steeped in the boiling water, cooled, the juices and fruit added, strained, then frozen or chilled with the spirits stirred in last. Add the gin and wine at the end, never to hot syrup, or the alcohol and the aroma both go off.
- YieldNamed for fifty — presumably fifty small punch glasses of two to three ounces each, since the ingredients make roughly a gallon of finished liquid. As a drink for modern glasses it serves about twelve to sixteen.
- Sugar by weightTwo pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. This is deliberately heavy: a frozen punch tastes markedly less sweet than the same syrup does at room temperature.
- A small can of pineappleThe recipe does not give a size and period can sizes varied, so judge by eye. Use canned crushed pineapple in juice or light syrup, including the liquid; fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not hurt this preparation but gives a sharper, thinner flavour than the cooked canned fruit the recipe assumes.
- Grate the rinds firstZest the two lemons and one orange before you cut and squeeze anything. Take only the coloured layer — white pith turns the punch bitter as it steeps.
- Freezing with alcoholA cup and a half of gin and wine in a gallon of syrup lowers the freezing point somewhat, and the heavy sugar lowers it further. Frozen in a churn or a shallow pan it should set soft and slushy rather than firm, which is what a punch ice is meant to be. More spirit would make it harder still to set.
- Champagne or sweet wineThe two are not interchangeable in sweetness. Sweet wine such as a Muscat or cream sherry pushes the sugar higher still; if you use it, consider trimming the sugar by a few tablespoons and tasting the mixture cold before freezing.
- StrainThe recipe does not say to strain, but grated rind, pulp and pineapple fibre can be taken out through a fine sieve or muslin before freezing if you want a smoother texture in the glass.
Frozen punches of this type — sugar syrup, citrus, canned or preserved fruit, and a modest lacing of spirits, churned only to a slush — were a fixture of American hotel and banquet menus in the late nineteenth century, usually served midway through a long dinner as a palate-clearing course rather than as a drink. The style is generally traced to the Roman punch of French service, and the presence of canned pineapple and a bottle of gin in the same list is a good marker of the period: commercial canning was by then making tropical fruit more readily available to a professional kitchen, though how commonplace it had become is harder to say.