Home › At the Fountain › Cardinal Punch
Cardinal Punch
Make a syrup of 2 pounds of sugar and 1 quart of water, to this add the rind of 2 oranges and the juice of 4, 1 ounce of whole cloves and 1 stick of whole cinnamon. Then add 2 quarts of red wine, ½ pint of port wine and 1 gill of Cognac; strain and freeze. When half frozen add 1 pint of wine jelly and color it a bright red, then continue freezing until done.
A frozen wine punch from the era when soda fountains ran their own ice-cream freezers. It is essentially a spiced orange sorbet spiked hard with red wine, and the alcohol governs everything about how it behaves.
- The hinge: it will never freeze hardTwo quarts of wine plus port and brandy in roughly a gallon of base puts the alcohol well above what a home freezer can set. Expect a slush, and serve it as one, in glasses with a spoon. Churning in an ice-cream machine with plenty of salt and ice gets it as firm as it will ever go.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. The half pint of port is one cup.
- Whole spices, then strainAn ounce of whole cloves is a large quantity, roughly a third of a cup. Steep them and the cinnamon in the hot syrup off the heat. The recipe strains only after the wines have gone in, but straining out the spices earlier is safer if you want to keep the clove from dominating.
- The orange rindPare it in strips with a peeler and keep the white pith out. Add it to the hot syrup with the spices and remove it at straining.
- Wine jellyA period preparation of wine, sugar and gelatin set soft, not a fruit preserve. Whisked into the half-frozen punch it acts as a stabiliser and keeps the ice crystals fine. A cup of firmly set wine gelatin, broken up and stirred through, does the same job; without it the mixture will be coarse and grainy.
- The colouringBright red at a 1900s fountain meant cochineal or an early coal-tar dye. Modern red food colouring works, or leave it: a dark, tannic red wine gives a respectable colour on its own.
- The wine to useSomething dry, cheap and fruity. Sugar is already present at two pounds, and an oaky or heavily tannic bottle turns bitter as it chills.
- YieldAround a gallon before freezing, so twenty to twenty-five punch-cup servings. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd, and note that it is unmistakably alcoholic.
Cardinal punch is generally said to take its name from the colour of a cardinal's robes, and the name attaches to a whole family of red wine punches served through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hot and cold, frozen and poured. Its appearance in a soda-fountain manual is a reminder that the American fountain was not always a temperance institution: the same marble counter that dispensed phosphates and ice cream sodas also turned out iced wine punches for private parties, weddings and hotel dinners, and the confectioner's ice-cream freezer was the obvious machine for the job. Frozen punches like this one were often served mid-meal as a *sorbet* course, a cold pause between roast and game, which is why the quantity here is generous and the sweetness high. Prohibition removed the wine and left the fountain with the soda, and recipes of this kind largely dropped out of later editions of such books.