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Champagne Punch
1 cup water 2 cups sugar. Juice 2 lemons 2 tablespoons Orange Curaçoa 2 cups tea infusion Ice 2 tablespoons Medford rum 1 quart soda water 1 quart California champagne 4 tablespoons brandy Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes. Mix champagne, brandy, rum, Curaçoa, lemon juice, and tea infusion. Sweeten to taste with syrup and pour into punchbowl over a large piece of ice. Just before serving add soda water.
A standard Victorian-era punch bowl formula: spirits and wine cut with tea, citrus and soda over a single block of ice. The ingredient list as printed is garbled by the two-column setting of the original page, and the syrup quantities are missing entirely.
- The syrup is unmeasuredThe method says to boil water and sugar ten minutes but the list gives no amounts. Equal parts sugar and water by volume — a cup of each — will yield more than enough here, and you add it to taste rather than all at once.
- Tea infusionTwo cups of tea, brewed and cooled. Let it go cold before mixing; warm tea will melt the ice block and dilute the punch.
- California champagneSparkling wine from California, then a cheaper alternative to the French. Any dry sparkling wine works.
- Medford rumA dark, heavy New England rum distilled in Medford, Massachusetts, and long a New England pantry staple. Substitute a dark Jamaican or Demerara rum rather than a light one.
- CuraçoaThe old spelling of curaçao, the orange liqueur. Two tablespoons of any decent orange curaçao or triple sec does the job.
- The ice blockOne large piece, not cubes — the whole point is slow melting so the punch chills without watering down. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a bowl the day before.
- Order of assemblyMix everything except the soda water first, sweeten, then add the soda immediately before serving as directed. Adding it early flattens the punch.
- YieldRoughly three quarts, or about twenty-four punch-cup servings of four ounces. It is strong: a quart of sparkling wine plus eight tablespoons of spirits and liqueur.
Punch reached New England from the English colonial trade — the word is generally traced to Sanskrit pañc, five, for the traditional five elements of spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice — and by the late nineteenth century a bowl of it was the fixture of any American reception large enough to need one. Fannie Farmer's version is a fashionable, wine-forward variant of the older rum punches Boston had been drinking since the eighteenth century, when Medford rum was distilled from West Indian molasses a few miles up the Mystic River. Its appearance in a cooking school textbook is a reminder that domestic-science instruction covered entertaining as well as economy: the same volume that teaches white sauce and invalid cookery expects a graduate to be able to fill a punchbowl for a crowd. The specification of California champagne is itself dated — the state's sparkling wine industry was young, cheap and proudly domestic, and Prohibition would shortly interrupt it. </p>