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Fruit Punch III
1 cup sugar 1 cup hot tea infusion ¾ cup orange juice 1/3 cup lemon juice 1 pint ginger ale 1 pint Apollinaris Few slices orange Pour tea over sugar, and as soon as sugar is dissolved add fruit juices. Strain into punch-bowl over a large piece of ice, and just before serving add ale, Apollinaris, and slices of orange. For tea infusion use two teaspoons tea and one and one-fourth cups boiling water. 9 oranges 6 lemons
A tea-based punch of the sort Fannie Farmer's kitchen turned out for receptions and church suppers. Almost nothing here needs translating except the mineral water and one puzzling line at the end.
- ApollinarisA naturally sparkling mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, widely sold in America around 1900 and often specified by name in punch recipes. Any dry, strongly carbonated mineral water works; club soda or seltzer is the closest cheap substitute.
- The tea is the hingeTwo teaspoons of leaf to one and a quarter cups of boiling water is a strong infusion, and the extra quarter cup may simply allow for what the leaves absorb. Steep three to five minutes and strain the leaves out at once; a longer steep turns the punch tannic and bitter, and the bitterness is much more obvious once the drink is cold and sweet.
- "9 oranges 6 lemons" at the endThis trailing line does not belong to the quart-sized recipe above it, which needs only about one orange and two lemons. What it refers to is unclear: the proportions invert this recipe's own ratio of lemon juice to orange juice, so it may be a note for a larger batch or stray matter from an adjacent recipe. Treat it as a note rather than an instruction.
- Sugar syrupPouring the hot tea over the sugar is the whole point of the order of operations: granulated sugar will not dissolve properly in a cold, acidic punch, and undissolved sugar settles to the bottom of the bowl.
- A large piece of iceNot cubes. A single block melts far more slowly and keeps the punch cold without watering it down; freeze water in a loaf pan, a metal bowl or a clean quart container the day before.
- Timing the fizzAdd the ginger ale and mineral water at the last possible moment, as the recipe says. Once carbonation is stirred into a sweet, acidic liquid over ice it goes flat quickly.
- CloudinessCold black tea often turns hazy. It is harmless and mostly hidden by the ginger ale, but letting the infusion cool at room temperature rather than in the refrigerator keeps it clearer.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, or roughly a dozen four-ounce punch-cup servings. Multiply by three or four for a full punch bowl.
Tea punch belongs to the temperance side of the American punch tradition: by the 1890s a great many church socials, women's club meetings and afternoon receptions wanted something ceremonial to ladle out of a bowl without spirits in it, and strong tea supplied the astringency and body that wine or rum would otherwise have given. Fannie Merritt Farmer's book carries several numbered fruit punches so a hostess could pick according to what was in the house, and this one leans on two commercial products that signal the period precisely: bottled ginger ale, then still thought of as a slightly medicinal beverage, and Apollinaris water, the German spring water advertised for decades in America as the "Queen of Table Waters" and stocked by any grocer with pretensions. Naming a specific imported mineral water in a cookbook aimed at Boston households says a good deal about who was expected to be reading it.