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Calcutta Lemonade
Pare thinly the peel of 2 dozen fresh lemons, squeeze the juice of them on the peel, and let them stand 12 hours. Then add 2 pounds of granulated sugar and 1 quart of good sherry, 3 quarts boiling milk. When cold strain through a cloth. Serve with chopped ice and a straw.
This is a clarified milk punch under a fountain name: the milk is meant to curdle, and the curds carry away the cloudiness and harshness, leaving a clear, silky drink. Everything here depends on straining it properly.
- Do not fight the curdlingWhen boiling milk hits lemon juice and sherry it will separate immediately into curds and whey. That is the entire mechanism, not an accident. Stir once and leave it alone to set for an hour or more before straining.
- The peel stepParing the zest thinly and burying it under the juice for 12 hours is an oleo-saccharum in reverse; the acid pulls the citrus oil out of the peel. Take only the yellow, no white pith, or the finished punch turns bitter.
- Straining through a clothUse a jelly bag or a double layer of damp muslin in a sieve, and let it drip without pressing or squeezing. The first pass will run cloudy; pour that back through the same cloth, which by then has a bed of curd on it acting as the filter. Two or three passes gets it clear.
- Quantities and yieldTwo dozen lemons give roughly 3 cups of juice. With a quart of sherry and 3 quarts of milk you start with something over five quarts, and lose an unpredictable amount to the discarded curds; expect roughly four quarts of strained punch, enough for a couple of dozen small fountain glasses.
- The sherryUse a drinkable dry to medium sherry rather than a cream sherry, and not cooking sherry, which is salted; the recipe says only 'good sherry' and does not specify a style. The finished drink is mildly alcoholic, on the order of a light wine spritzer.
- SugarTwo pounds is about 4 1/2 cups. As the recipe has it, the sugar goes in with the juice before the boiling milk, which dissolves it; if you leave it until the punch is cold you will be stirring at grit for a long time.
- Keeping and servingClarified milk punch keeps well refrigerated, and many find it improves after a day or two. Serve very cold over chopped ice with a straw, as directed; it does not need shaking or any further dilution.
Clarified milk punch belongs to the English punch tradition of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where citrus, sugar, spirit and hot milk were combined and filtered to produce something clear, keeping and gentle on the palate; recipes of this shape circulate in British household books well before American soda fountains existed, and one is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The "Calcutta" in the name most likely gestures at the East India trade rather than at any Indian dish, though the recipe gives no explanation for it. Its appearance in a soda book is a reminder that the American fountain before Prohibition was not restricted to carbonated syrups: dispensers served milk shakes, egg drinks, lemonades and wine-based punches from the same counter, and a batch punch that could be made a day ahead and poured cold over shaved ice suited fountain service exactly.