Home › At the Fountain › Christmas Punch
Christmas Punch
Juice of 1 lemon, ½ ounce sherbet syrup. Mix these in an 8-ounce mug, draw 6 ounces of hot water into another mug, pour on the latter a small amount of alcohol and ignite it, and mix this liquid with the liquid in the other mug by pouring back and forth from one mug to the other a few times.
This is a fountain drink from the era when drugstore soda counters kept winter trade with hot beverages, and it is written for a dispenser who had a stock bottle of alcohol on the shelf. The flaming step is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The unnamed "alcohol"The recipe gives no grade, no proof and no measured quantity. A drugstore fountain would most likely have reached for a potable spirit, but a pharmacy shelf could also hold liquids sold simply as "alcohol" for lamps and cleaning, including denatured and wood (methyl) alcohol, which is poisonous and burns with a similarly pale flame. The text does nothing to distinguish them.
- Pouring a burning liquidThe instruction is to ignite spirit and then pour the lit liquid back and forth between two open mugs several times. High-proof alcohol flame is nearly invisible in a lit room, the vapour above the mug ignites as readily as the liquid, and a spill during the transfer carries the fire with it onto the counter, the hand or clothing. This is not the controlled flambé of a pan on a burner.
- "A small amount"With no quantity given, the alcohol charge is left entirely to the dispenser. In a 6-ounce mug of hot water the difference between a teaspoon and a quarter-cup of 190-proof spirit is the difference between a novelty and a flare.
- What sherbet syrup wasNot frozen sherbet. Fountain sherbet syrup was generally a sweet syrup soured with citric or tartaric acid, sometimes foamed with egg albumen, used to give sharpness to lemonades and punches. Little sold under that name today resembles it.
- The half ounce½ fluid ounce of syrup is one tablespoon, and the drink is built in an 8-ounce mug: 6 ounces of water, the syrup and the juice of one lemon make a single serving of roughly seven to eight ounces, which is why the mug is sized as it is.
- If you want a hot punchUse a current recipe with a named spirit and a stated quantity, added off the heat. Do not reconstruct the ignition step.
Soda fountains were seasonal businesses, and the trade press of the early twentieth century pushed hot drinks hard as the answer to a dead December counter: hot chocolate, hot beef tea, hot lemonade, hot "punches" poured mug to mug for show. Most fountains sat inside drugstores, so the dispenser had a pharmacist's shelf behind him. The back-and-forth pour is an old punch-house gesture, generally traced to the way hot toddies and flip were mixed and aerated by throwing the liquid between two vessels; here it has been kept for theatre, with a flame added. Christmas punch in a temperance-adjacent setting like a fountain can also be read as a piece of mimicry, giving a customer the ritual and the smell of a spirituous holiday drink over a counter that mostly sold syrup and soda water.