Home › At the Fountain › St. Julien Punch
St. Julien Punch
Eighteen ounces claret wine, 8 ounces Catawba wine, 1 pint prepared lemon; 2 ounces acid solution phosphate, 4 ounces sliced lemon, 4 ounces sliced orange, 2 ounces Jamaica rum, 1 gallon water. Sweeten to suit taste. Mix in large punch bowl with cracked ice and color to suit.
A soda-fountain punch bowl formula, written for a dispenser who had syrups and acid phosphate on the counter. Two of its ingredients are trade preparations rather than groceries, and the whole thing needs tasting before it is sweetened.
- Prepared lemonFountain shorthand for lemon syrup — strained lemon juice cut with heavy simple syrup, sometimes with a little citric acid. A pint of it is doing most of the sweetening as well as the souring, so build it yourself (roughly equal parts juice and syrup) rather than substituting plain juice, or the balance collapses.
- Acid solution phosphateDilute phosphoric acid, the standard fountain souring agent of the period, still sold as food-grade acid phosphate for soda work. Two ounces in a gallon and a half is a sharp, dry edge rather than a fruit flavour; lemon juice is not the same thing, though it is the usual stand-in.
- Catawba wineA sweetish white or pink American wine from the Catawba grape, once the most widely planted wine grape in the eastern states and distinctly foxy in flavour. Bottlings still exist from Ohio and the Finger Lakes; failing that, an off-dry rosé is closer than any dry white.
- ClaretRed Bordeaux, or in American practice of the day any dry red sold under that name. Eighteen ounces is a little over two cups — the wine is the backbone here, so a sound medium-bodied red matters more than the label.
- Sweeten last, and tasteThe instruction is not a formality. Between the syrup, the Catawba and a gallon of water, the punch can land anywhere; add sugar syrup in small pours and stop while the acid still shows.
- "Color to suit"Period fountain guides give colouring formulas using cochineal and coal-tar (aniline) dyes. Skip it; more sliced fruit, or a splash of extra claret, will darken the bowl without any of it.
- Ice and dilutionCracked ice in the bowl will thin the punch as it goes, on top of the gallon of water already called for. Either chill the mixture first and use large blocks, or hold back some of the water until serving.
- YieldAbout a gallon and a half before ice — depending on cup size, roughly thirty punch-cup servings, with alcohol somewhere around 2 percent by volume. This is a party bowl, not a single drink.
The name points at Saint-Julien, the Médoc commune whose red wine was familiar to nineteenth-century American drinkers as "claret." What makes the drink specifically American is the second wine: Catawba, a native grape popularised commercially in the Ohio valley in the mid-1800s and celebrated in verse by Longfellow, which gave a cheap, faintly musky sweetness that no European wine offered. The recipe sits in a soda-fountain manual because by the turn of the century the fountain was a full beverage counter, dispensing wine punches, phosphates and lemonades from the same marble slab; acid phosphate, the odd item on this list to modern eyes, was a standard souring agent there.