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Cardinal Punch
4 cups water 2 cups sugar 2/3 cup orange juice 1/3 cup lemon juice 1/4 cup brandy 1/4 cup Curaçoa 1/4 cup tea infusion Make syrup as for Lemon Ice, add fruit juice and tea, freeze to a mush; add strong liquors and continue freezing Serve in frappé glasses.
A frozen punch rather than a dessert ice — meant to be served slushy in small glasses, between courses or at a reception. The alcohol is added late for a reason, and that is the whole trick.
- Add the spirits last, as directedAlcohol depresses the freezing point sharply; stirred in at the start, the mixture will never set beyond a cold liquid. Freeze the syrup, juice and tea to a stiff mush first, then work in the brandy and curaçao and continue churning only until it is firm enough to mound on a spoon.
- "Syrup as for Lemon Ice"Boil the 4 cups water with the 2 cups sugar to a syrup and cool it before the juices and tea go in; the exact boiling time and the point at which the juice is added belong to that other recipe, which is not reproduced here. Chilling the syrup thoroughly before freezing saves a good deal of churning time.
- CuraçoaThe book's spelling of curaçao, the orange liqueur. Any dry orange liqueur works; a sweeter triple sec will push an already sweet punch further, so cut the sugar slightly if that is all you have.
- Tea infusionA quarter cup of strong brewed tea, not tea leaves; black tea is the likely intention though the recipe does not say. Brew it strong and let it cool; the tannin keeps the punch from tasting like plain orangeade.
- Freezing equipmentWritten for a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt. A modern ice cream machine handles it, but stop while it is still slushy rather than running to a hard set. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes, adding the liquors once it is mushy.
- It will not freeze hardWith half a cup of spirits in roughly a quart and a half of liquid, this stays soft even in a home freezer. That is the intended texture — frappé, spoonable, not scoopable. Serve it straight from the freezer as it slumps quickly.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, which fills eight to ten small frappé or punch glasses. Any stemmed glass of 4 to 5 ounces does the job.
Cardinal punch is generally said to take its name from the red of a cardinal's robes, and versions found in nineteenth-century American punch books are often deep crimson from claret, red wine or raspberry. This frozen version keeps the name but not the colour, relying on brandy, orange liqueur and tea for its character — the tea being a common trick of the period for giving punches body and a faint astringency. Frozen punches like this belonged to the formal multi-course dinner, where a spoonful of something icy and barely sweet was served midway through the meal as a sorbet course to refresh the palate before the roast.