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Victoria Punch
6 or 8 oranges--according to size. 12 lemons. 3 pounds of sugar. 2 quarts of water. 1 pint of angelica or other sweet wine. 1/2 pint of rum. 8 Whites of eggs.
Grate the rinds of half the lemons into a bowl, add the rum, and rub with the back of a spoon to extract the flavor. Squeeze in the juice of all the fruit, add the other ingredients and freeze. Then whip the whites, stir in, beat up and freeze again.
A frozen punch of the sort served between courses rather than at the end of a meal. It reads simply, but two things in it need flagging: the raw egg whites, which are never heated at any point, and a set of nineteenth-century assumptions about equipment and ingredients.
- The whites are never cookedEight raw whites are whipped and folded into a mixture that only ever gets colder. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it suspends it, and the punch is then held and served cold. This is the reason the recipe cannot be made as written, and a current recipe for a frozen punch or spoom should be used instead.
- Alcohol will not let it setAlcohol will not let it set firmly -- a pint of sweet wine and half a pint of rum against two quarts of water, plus three pounds of sugar, depress the freezing point enough that the mixture stays soft. The original expected a slushy, spoonable ice rather than a firm sorbet, and modern equipment will not change that by much.
- AngelicaA sweet fortified wine made in California from Mission grapes, once common and now made by only a handful of producers. The recipe's own "or other sweet wine" indicates it was treated here as interchangeable with any sweet dessert wine.
- "Freeze" means the salt-and-ice freezer"Freeze" almost certainly means the salt-and-ice freezer -- a hand-cranked churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt. The second freezing after the whites go in is most likely a re-churn to aerate the mixture.
- YieldOnce the juice of all that fruit and three pounds of dissolved sugar are counted with the two quarts of water and the pint and a half of wine and spirits, the liquid comes to something like four to five quarts before the whites are folded in, and more after. Either way it is a large batch, well beyond a single household serving.
- Citrus proportionsTwelve lemons to six or eight oranges gives a very sharp base; the three pounds of sugar are structural as much as sweetening, since sugar concentration is what keeps a water ice smooth rather than granular.
Frozen punches occupied a specific slot in the long American banquet menu of the 1880s and 1890s: served after the roast and before the game or salad, as a cold, sharp pause meant to reset the palate. They carried grand names — Roman punch, punch à la Romaine, and royal borrowings like this one. The addition of whipped whites at the second freezing is what distinguishes a punch of this type from a plain water ice; the resulting light, foamy texture is that of the meringue-lightened sorbet known as a spoom, already current in the period. The American Pastry Cook was written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments rather than households, which is why the quantities run to a dozen lemons and eight whites with no note on how many it serves.