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Christmas Pudding
Boil together for five minutes i quart of water and 1 pound of sugar. Add the grated rinds of 2 lemons and 4 oranges and continue boiling for minutes longer. Strain the syrup through cheese cloth and add 1 quart of cold water. Extract the juice from the lemons and oranges, strain and mix with 2 dozen Malaga grapes cut in half and seeded, 2 sliced oranges, 4 slices of pineapple, 1 banana cut into slices, and 1 pint bottle of maraschino cherries, with their liquor, the cherries being halved. Serve from a punch bowl in which a cube of ice has been placed No soda water dealer can prepare all his fruit, concentrated syrups, or crushed fruits and make them as good or as cheaply as he can procure them from reputable manufacturers.
A soda-fountain fruit punch rather than a steamed pudding: the name comes from the mound of mixed winter fruit floating in the bowl. It scales easily and wants to be made several hours ahead.
- The syrup is a plain 2:1The syrup is thin -- one quart of water to one pound of sugar is two parts water to one of sugar by weight, and after five minutes' boiling yields roughly 1.2 quarts. The number for the second boil, after the zest goes in, is missing from the printed text; keep it short, since long boiling drives off the citrus oil you are trying to capture.
- Zest, then juiceGrate the rinds before you juice the fruit, and take only the coloured layer. White pith boiled in syrup turns the punch bitter, and the bitterness does not fade with chilling.
- Malaga grapesA large green-white table grape once standard in American fruit shops. Any firm seedless green grape works; halving them is still worth doing so they take up syrup instead of bobbing whole.
- Maraschino cherries and their liquorAt the period these could be cherries genuinely preserved in maraschino liqueur, with real flavour in the bottled liquor, though imitation dyed and almond-flavoured cherries were already widespread. Modern supermarket maraschinos are dyed and packed in corn syrup; use bottled cocktail cherries in genuine liqueur if you want the intended effect.
- PineappleFour slices means four rings off a fresh or canned cored pineapple, roughly 1.25 to 1.5 cups diced.
- BananaAdd sliced banana within an hour of serving; it goes to mush faster than the rest of the fruit.
- The cube of iceA single large block, not cubes as we mean them now. A block melts slowly and keeps the punch cold without watering it down; a frozen ring or a large mould does the same job.
- YieldAbout three quarts of liquid plus roughly a quart of fruit — 18 to 20 punch-cup servings. Ladle fruit into each cup with the liquid.
Soda-fountain manuals of the early twentieth century borrowed the names of grand dishes for cold drinks, and "Christmas Pudding" here looks like a piece of merchandising: the bowl of grapes, cherries, orange and pineapple may be meant to stand in for the studded fruit of the baked original. The fruits chosen tell you what a well-supplied American fountain could get in December anges, Malgra grapes, canned pineapple from Hawaii, and bottled maraschino cherries, all of them imports that the railroads and the canning industry had made ordinary within a generation. Punch served from a bowl, rather than mixed by the glass, would have suited catering work, and recipes like this were plausibly printed as much for that side of the business as for the counter.