Home › At the Fountain › Cider Punch (Chip the thin yellow rind)
Cider Punch (Chip the thin yellow rind)
Chip the thin yellow rind from a lemon, bruise it slightly and add a cup of sherry wine. Let it stand an hour. Squeeze the juice of 1 lemon and 2 it stand an hour. Squeeze the juice of 1 lemon and 2 oranges over ½ cups of granulated sugar, add a quart of cider that has a slight "nip," then pour over the lemon rind and sherry. Turn into a freezer and freeze same as water ice. Serve in glasses and over each pour a teaspoonful of brandy.
A soda-fountain punch that is really a boozy granita: sherry-steeped lemon peel, citrus juice and hard cider frozen to a slush and finished with brandy. The sugar quantity is the one figure worth pinning down before you start.
- The sugar is ambiguousThe text reads "½ cups of granulated sugar," which has almost certainly lost a whole number in front of the fraction. For a quart of cider plus a cup of sherry, somewhere between 1 and 1½ cups is a plausible reading; taste the mix before freezing and adjust, since sweetness drops noticeably once cold.
- Cider means alcoholic cider"A slight nip" is the period's way of saying fermented, lightly alcoholic hard cider, not the sweet unfermented juice sold as cider in the United States today. Sweet juice will give a cloying, one-note ice.
- Chipping the rindTake only the yellow zest in wide strips with a peeler, no white pith, and press or twist the strips to release the oils before the sherry goes on. An hour is enough; longer extracts bitterness.
- Freeze same as water iceFor the period that meant a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt, churned to a fine slush. An ice cream machine works, or freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes.
- It will not freeze hardWith roughly a cup of sherry and a quart of hard cider, the alcohol keeps this at or near a spoonable slush. Plan on serving it soft, in chilled glasses, rather than scooping it like sorbet.
- Strain before freezingFish out the rind strips and any citrus pulp so the finished ice is clean on the tongue and free of stray pith.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of frozen punch, enough for six to eight small glasses, each topped with its teaspoon of brandy at the moment of serving.
Frozen punches like this one belonged to the soda fountain's more ambitious side, where the dispenser was expected to turn out ices and sherbets alongside carbonated drinks. The form descends from the Roman punch and similar wine ices served as a mid-meal palate cleanser in nineteenth-century American dinners, adapted here to cider, the everyday fermented drink of the northeastern farm. The teaspoon of brandy poured over each glass is what was often called a "float," a fountain flourish that let the drinker smell the spirit before tasting the ice. That a recipe built on sherry, hard cider and brandy should be printed at all is a reminder that the fountain was not yet a temperance institution everywhere; that shift came with Prohibition, which pushed such formulas to the margins of the trade books.