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Claret Punch
Very Fortifying.
French Brandy, ½ pint; Strong Green Tea Infusion, 1 quart; Santa Croix Rum, ½ pint; Water, 2 gallons; Claret Wine, 1 gallon; Crushed Pineapple, ½ pint; Sugar, 8 lbs. Sliced Orange and Lemon I each Put ingredients, as named, in a large punch bowl in which you have a large cake of ice. Ladle out 4 ounces with a punch ladle into a mineral glass, fill with solid soda, serve with a straw, made more inviting by putting an American Maraschino Cherry in each glass.
A soda-fountain punch built by the bowl and finished by the glass. The proportions are for a crowd of a hundred or more, so the main work of modernising it is arithmetic.
- YieldThe bowl comes to roughly 3½ gallons before ice, and the sugar adds more volume still. At 4 oz of punch per glass that is well over a hundred drinks. Scale down by an eighth for a party of about fifteen: 2 tbsp brandy, 2 tbsp rum, 2 cups claret, 4 cups water, ½ cup strong green tea, 2 tbsp pineapple, 1 lb sugar.
- UnitsA pint is 16 oz, a quart 32, a gallon 128. Half a pint of brandy is one cup. Eight pounds of sugar is about 18 cups — genuinely that much, and it is what makes the mixture read as a fountain syrup rather than a wine punch.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThe instruction to "put ingredients, as named, in a large punch bowl" will leave you stirring granulated sugar into cold wine for a long time. Cook it with the water into a syrup and cool it, or dissolve it in the hot tea infusion before anything alcoholic goes in.
- Santa Croix RumSt. Croix rum, from the island then in the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) — generally reckoned in the trade a lighter, drier style than Jamaican. Any decent aged Caribbean rum stands in; avoid heavily spiced bottlings, which will fight the tea.
- ClaretNineteenth-century American trade usage for red Bordeaux, and by extension any dry red in that mould. A modest Bordeaux, Cabernet blend or Carignan works; nothing oaky or high in alcohol.
- Strong green tea infusionStrong tea presumably contributes tannin and grip as much as flavour, though the recipe says only 'strong'. About 3 tbsp of leaf per quart, steeped briefly, will get you there; pushed further it turns bitter and the bitterness carries through the sugar.
- "Solid soda"Fountain shorthand for plain carbonated water drawn from the stream valve, as opposed to the coarse foaming draw. Bottled seltzer or club soda is the equivalent; a 4 oz pour of punch in an 8–10 oz glass gives roughly the intended dilution.
- The cake of iceA single large block, not cubes. It chills the bowl while melting slowly, so the punch does not water down over an afternoon of service. A gallon of water frozen in a loaf pan or plastic tub does the same job.
- Crushed pineappleIn a soda shop this meant the sweetened fountain fruit packed in syrup, not fresh fruit. Canned crushed pineapple in juice is closer than fresh; drain it lightly.
Fountain books like this one sat at the point where the drug store soda counter overlapped with the bar trade, and the recipes show it: this is a bowl punch in the older Anglo-American manner — spirit, wine, citrus, sugar, tea — reworked so it can be ladled out four ounces at a time and topped with carbonated water. Strong tea was a common component of punch from the eighteenth century onward, supplying the tannic grip that keeps a heavily sugared drink from tasting flat. "Claret" as a name for red Bordeaux is an English borrowing from the French clairet, a lighter-coloured wine, and it stayed in American price lists and menus long after it had stopped describing anything specific about the bottle. The note "Very Fortifying" reads as a survival of the period when the soda fountain still presented itself as a branch of pharmacy, and the specification of an American maraschino cherry reflects the years when domestic cherries were displacing the imported marasca fruit.