Home › At the Fountain › Caprice Punch
Caprice Punch
Two quarts of orange ice, 1 gill of brandy and 1 pint of good sherry wine, color lightly with American Ruby Color, and add an Italian meringue of 3 eggs.
A fountain punch built on a base of orange water ice, spiked and lightened with meringue. The whole thing depends on folding a stable Italian meringue into a very cold base without letting either collapse.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. With the pint of sherry that is 20 fluid ounces of alcohol against two quarts of ice.
- Orange ice, not sherbetA period "ice" is a water ice: orange juice, sugar syrup and water, churned, with no dairy. Commercial orange sherbet contains milk and will read as a different drink entirely.
- Italian meringueThree egg whites whipped to soft peak, then a sugar syrup cooked to about 240F poured in a thin stream while beating until the bowl is cool and the meringue holds a firm peak. The cooked syrup matters here: an uncooked French meringue of whites and dry sugar is far less stable and will slacken in the alcohol.
- Egg whitesThe hot syrup brings the whites close to but not reliably through a pasteurizing temperature. If serving anyone vulnerable, start from cartoned pasteurized whites.
- American Ruby ColorA proprietary red coloring sold to the fountain trade under that name. Any modern red food coloring gives the intended tint; the instruction to color "lightly" is worth honoring, since the point is a blush over orange, not a red drink.
- It will not stay frozenThat much brandy and sherry depresses the freezing point badly. Soften the ice only enough to fold, keep the mixing bowl over ice, and serve at once as a thick slush rather than expecting a scoopable dessert.
- YieldTwo quarts of ice plus 20 fluid ounces of liquor and wine is already over two and a half quarts before the meringue goes in, so expect three quarts or more of finished punch.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew no firm line between the drug store counter and the bar, and books of this kind print "punches" that are ices loosened with spirits and lightened with meringue; frozen punches were also served between courses at formal dinners of the period. The meringue is doing real work here: it gives body and a white crown to a mixture that alcohol keeps from setting properly. Names like "Caprice" appear to have been house coinages, carrying no fixed formula from book to book. Recipes of this kind fell away from American fountains with Prohibition, which pushed the trade toward syrups, phosphates and ice cream.