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Club Punch
1 cup water 2 cups sugar 1 quart Vichy 3 sliced oranges 1 quart Burgundy 1 cup rum 1½ can pineapple Juice 2 lemons 1/3 cup brandy ⅓ cup Benedictine 1 cup tea infusion Ice.
Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes. Mix remaining ingredients, except ice, sweeten to taste with syrup, and pour into punch-bowl over a large piece of ice.
A large-format Edwardian punch bowl, built on a boiled sugar syrup and a bottle of red Burgundy. The proportions as printed are garbled in places, so read the whole list before you shop.
- VichyVichy is French sparkling mineral water, sold then as a table water in siphons and bottles. Any sparkling mineral water or club soda stands in; add it at the last moment so the punch is still lively when served.
- The pineapple line"1½ can pineapple Juice" is ambiguous — canned pineapple then came in sizes from about 8 oz to a No. 2½ tin (roughly 28 oz). Somewhere between 2 and 3 cups of juice is the sensible reading; taste as you go rather than committing all of it.
- BenedictineA cup and a half of Benedictine is a great deal of a sweet, herbal, high-proof liqueur, and it will dominate. Many punch recipes of the period call for a wineglass (about 2 fl oz); if the bowl is meant to be drinkable, start with a few ounces and work up.
- Tea infusionA cup of strong black tea, brewed and cooled, is doing real work here: the tannin gives the punch backbone and keeps the fruit and sugar from turning flabby. Do not skip it, and do not brew it hot into the bowl.
- The syrupTwo cups sugar to one cup water boiled ten minutes gives a heavy syrup that will keep for weeks refrigerated. You will not need all of it — the instruction is to sweeten to taste, and with pineapple juice and Benedictine already in the bowl that point comes early.
- The ice"A large piece of ice" is deliberate. One big block melts slowly and chills without watering the punch down; cubes will dilute a bowl this size within the hour. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a bowl the day before.
- YieldRoughly three and a half quarts before ice, which is about twenty-eight 4-oz punch cups; the unresolved pineapple quantity makes the total approximate. It is strong — wine, rum, brandy and liqueur — so the small cup is the correct measure.
- Oranges and lemonsThe two lemons are unspecified; juice them. The sliced oranges are for the bowl, and they will be more decorative than flavourful, so add them after the liquids are mixed rather than muddling them in.
Punch of this kind was a familiar feature of American club and dinner-party hospitality in the years around 1900 — a base of wine, a spirit or two, citrus, sugar, tea and an aerated water, assembled in quantity and served over a single block of ice. Vichy water was then a fashionable imported table water advertised by name in American cities, and Benedictine, the Normandy liqueur, had become a fixture of the fin-de-siecle bar. The tea is the older element, inherited from eighteenth-century English punch practice.