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Fruit Beverages (Lemon rind and boil five)
lemon rind, and boil five minutes. Add fruit juice, cool, strain, pour in claret, and dilute with ice-water.
Fruit Punch I 1 quart cold water 1/2 cup lemon juice 2 cups sugar • 2 cups chopped pineapple 1 cup orange juice Boil water, sugar, and pineapple twenty minutes; add fruit juice, cool, strain, and dilute with ice-water.
Two punches run together here: the tail end of a claret cup, then Fruit Punch I in full. Both work on the same principle — a heavy fruit syrup made ahead, then let down with ice-water to taste at the last minute.
- The fragment at the topThe opening line belongs to a claret punch whose beginning is on the previous page; it boils sugar syrup with lemon rind for five minutes, then takes fruit juice, cooling, straining, and claret. The quantities are on the page we cannot see, so treat it as a related preparation rather than a standalone recipe.
- Boiling the pineappleTwenty minutes of boiling is not excessive here: it is extracting flavour from the chopped fruit into the syrup and softening it enough to give up its juice on straining.
- Add the juice off the heatThe citrus goes in after the syrup comes off the stove. Boiled lemon and orange juice turns flat and faintly cooked; adding it to hot syrup and letting the residual heat do the work keeps the aromatics.
- StrainingThe instruction assumes a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth. The cooked pineapple is spent by this point — press it against the sieve to recover the syrup and discard the pulp.
- How much ice-waterThe book gives no figure. The finished syrup runs to roughly a quart and a half and is aggressively sweet; two to three quarts of ice-water brings it into balance, giving about a gallon and serving 20 to 25 punch cups.
- Ice-water, not iceThe dilution is water that has been chilled, added as a measured quantity. If you drop a block of ice into the bowl instead, it will melt into the punch and dilute it further, so hold back a quart of the water and let the ice make up the difference.
- Lemon rindWhere the claret version calls for rind, use pared zest with no white pith, and take it out before the punch cools completely. Left in overnight it turns the syrup bitter.
A book that devoted pages to chafing dishes and afternoon teas needed a beverage that could be scaled up for a reception or a church social. The syrup-and-dilute method here is the practical heart of it: the concentrate can be made a day ahead and held cold, then let down with ice-water at the moment of serving, which matters when refrigeration means an icebox. The name punch is generally traced to Sanskrit pañc, five, said by tradition to stand for the five components of the original sailors' drink — spirit, sugar, lemon, water and spice — and the fruit punches of this period are essentially that formula with the spirit dropped, a change owing much to temperance sentiment in the households these books served. That the claret version and the alcohol-free one appear together in the same book shows the two conventions coexisting.