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Claret Punch
1 quart cold water. 1/2 cup raisins. 2 cups sugar. 2 inch piece stick cinnamon Few shavings lemon rind 1⅓ cups orange juice 1/3 cup lemon juice 1 pint claret wine Put raisins in cold water, bring slowly to boiling-point, and boil twenty minutes; strain, add sugar, cinnamon,
The text as printed is both truncated and garbled: the raisins, sugar and water that the method calls for never made it into the ingredient list, and the method itself breaks off mid-sentence. What follows is what can be said reliably about the parts that survive.
- The orange juice quantity is wrong"11½ cups orange juice" against a single pint of claret is not a punch, it is orangeade. This is almost certainly 1½ cups, which balances the 1/3 cup lemon juice and the pint of wine. Treat the figure as unusable rather than converting it.
- Missing ingredientsThe method calls for raisins, sugar and cold water, none of which appear in the ingredient list. The raisins are simmered in water to make an infusion that is then strained and sweetened. Any amounts you use are your own reconstruction, not the original's.
- ClaretIn American and British usage of this period, claret means red Bordeaux, or any dry red sold in its style. A medium-bodied dry red — Cabernet-Merlot blend, or a Cotes du Rhone — is the right register. Nothing sweet or oaky.
- Boiling the raisins twenty minutesThat is not an error. Raisins are being used as a flavouring and colouring infusion, much as they are in a boiled fruit syrup, and they need the full time to give up anything. The fruit itself is discarded at the strain.
- The wine goes in last and off the heatThe wine and citrus juices are listed after the boiled elements, so they were most likely added to the cooled or merely warm base rather than boiled — but the method breaks off before it says so. Boiling wine drives off alcohol and can leave fruit juice flat and stewed.
- Lemon rind"Few shavings" means the coloured zest taken off in strips with a knife or peeler, no white pith, which would turn the punch bitter.
- Yield and serviceService -- Period practice was to strain the punch over a block of ice in a punch bowl and serve it cold, though the cinnamon and raisin base suits warm service equally. The surviving quantities are too incomplete to give a reliable yield.
Claret cup and claret punch were common mixed drinks of respectable American entertaining in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: wine-based, diluted, spiced and sweetened, and so acceptable at afternoon receptions and weddings where spirits would not have been. Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) carries a run of these alongside its lemonades and fruit punches. The word claret comes through Old French clairet, a light or pale red wine, and had long since attached itself in English to the reds of Bordeaux specifically.