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Regent Punch
This is the Most Delicious Punch Made.
Grate the rind of 2 lemons and 4 oranges, add 2 teaspoonfuls of best vanilla extract, 2 cloves, and a 2-inch stick of cinnamon, cover with a hot syrup (3 pounds sugar and 1 quart water) let all stand in a warm place for several hours. Add juice of 24 lemons, and 1 quart of Santa Croix rum. Strain. Put into punch bowl with lump of ice and serve in a mineral glass half full of punch and solid soda water.
A soda-fountain adaptation of a nineteenth-century punch: an oleo-saccharum-style zest infusion, heavy syrup, a great deal of lemon juice, and rum, finished with carbonated water at the glass rather than in the bowl.
- The hinge: infuse, don't boilThe flavor comes from hot syrup drawing the oils out of the grated zest over several hours in a warm place. Rushing it with a simmer drives off the citrus oil and the vanilla, and cooking the cinnamon and cloves hard turns the punch medicinal.
- The syrupThree pounds of sugar to one quart of water is roughly a 1.5:1 syrup by weight, thicker than modern simple syrup. It needs gentle heat and stirring to dissolve fully. The sugar, acid and spirit together should let the finished punch keep for some days in the refrigerator.
- Twenty-four lemonsThat is about 3 cups (700 ml) of juice from average supermarket lemons, though period fruit may well have been smaller. Measure the juice rather than counting fruit, and taste against the syrup before you commit the whole quart of rum.
- Santa Croix rumA period spelling of St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands: a moderately full-bodied cane rum, not a light Cuban style and not a heavy Jamaican pot still. Any decent aged amber rum stands in.
- Zest onlyGrate just the colored outer layer of the 2 lemons and 4 oranges. White pith turns the infusion bitter, and bitterness has nowhere to hide in a drink this sweet and sour.
- "Mineral glass" and "solid soda water"A mineral or soda glass at the fountain typically held somewhere in the region of 8 to 12 ounces. "Solid soda water" most likely means plain charged water with no syrup added; use unflavored seltzer, chilled hard so it keeps its gas.
- Strain properlyPass the finished punch through a fine sieve or a coffee filter to catch the grated rind, spice, and citrus pulp. Anything left behind will cloud the glass and go on extracting from the spice.
- YieldThe batch comes to roughly 3 1/2 quarts of concentrate before carbonation, giving somewhere around 25 servings at half a glass of punch topped with soda. Keep it cold.
Regent's Punch is generally traced to the household of George, Prince Regent, later George IV, and it circulates through English and American bar books across the nineteenth century in wildly variable form: green tea, champagne, and brandy appear alongside the rum in well-known versions, plus arrack or maraschino. What is striking here is the setting. By the time this appears in a soda book, the punch has been detached from the punch bowl at a private supper and reassembled as fountain work, built as a keeping concentrate and finished glass by glass with charged water. That was the standard soda-fountain economy: syrups and concentrates prepared in quantity behind the counter, carbonation added at the moment of service. The rum is a reminder that American fountains were not automatically temperance institutions, though many were, and that the same dispenser could serve a spirituous punch and an ice-cream soda from adjacent taps.