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Emperor Punch
Grate 2 pineapples, also the rind of 2 oranges and 2 lemons, add the juice nutmeg grated. Next make a boiling of 4 oranges and 6 lemons, half of a water and pour this over it; let syrup of 3 pounds of sugar and 2 quarts of in the freezer and add 1 pint of straw-stand until cool, then strain. Put this well-beaten egg whites. Just before berry juice and freeze, then mix in 2 well-beaten egg whites. Just kirsch- before pint of maraschino, 1 gill of kirsch-serving add the following liquors: Half pint of maraschino, 1 gill of wasser, 1 pint of champagne cider and a little curacoa.
The page as printed is scrambled — whole clauses have been transposed by the typesetter or the scanner, so the order of operations has to be inferred rather than read. Beyond that, the finished punch carries uncooked egg white that is never heated at any stage.
- Raw egg white, never cookedTwo beaten whites are stirred into a punch that is only ever frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it merely suspends it, and the mixture is then held at soda-fountain temperature and served. This is the reason the recipe should not be made from this text. Anyone wanting a frozen punch with an egg-white foam should work from a current recipe written around pasteurized whites.
- The text is corruptLines have been interleaved: "make a boiling of 4 oranges and 6 lemons, half of a water" and "let syrup of 3 pounds of sugar and 2 quarts of in the freezer" are two sentences shuffled together. The intended sense is a syrup of 3 lb sugar to 2 quarts water poured over the grated fruit and zest, cooled, strained, then frozen with a pint of strawberry juice. The phrase about egg whites is printed twice.
- A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. One gill of kirschwasser against half a pint of maraschino makes the cherry liqueur dominant.
- Champagne ciderIn American fountain usage this meant a sparkling apple cider, sometimes hard, sometimes not, bottled under pressure and sold as a mixer. It is not champagne and not the cloudy fresh cider sold today.
- Curacoa and maraschinoCuraçao is the orange liqueur; maraschino here is the clear Luxardo-style cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries, which is a twentieth-century product and would ruin the balance.
- Grated pineappleTwo whole pineapples grated on a box grater yields roughly 6-8 cups of pulp and juice. Added to 2 quarts of water, 3 pounds of sugar, the citrus juice and a pint of strawberry juice, the finished volume runs well over a gallon before the liquors go in — a quantity suited to a crowd rather than a single household table.
- "Freeze"At a soda fountain this meant working the mixture in a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer to a slush, not freezing it solid; the recipe's "in the freezer" refers to that machine, not a cabinet.
Grand-sounding punches — Emperor, Roman, Cardinal, Regent — filled the back pages of American fountain manuals in the decades on either side of 1900, when the drugstore soda fountain was competing with the hotel bar for afternoon trade. The frozen punch itself is older: the nineteenth-century punch à la romaine, a citrus-and-sugar ice softened with wine or spirits and beaten egg white, was served between courses at long dinners. What the fountain trade did was scale such things and standardise them into a syrup-and-fruit-juice formula a soda man could mix in quantity, with the liquors, as here, added at the last moment before serving. That the alcohol appears at the very end of the paragraph may mean the base could equally be served without it.