Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › German Punch
German Punch
2 cups water 1 cup sugar 1¾ cups tomatoes 3 tablespoons lemon 3 apples, cored, pared, and juice chopped Piece ginger root 3 tablespoons Maraschino Mix ingredients, except cordial, and cook thirty-five minutes. Rub through a sieve, add Maraschino, and freeze to a mush. 2 cups sugar 2 cups water
The typesetting here has collapsed two columns into one, so read the ingredients before you start: it is 1¾ cups tomatoes, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, and 3 apples cored, pared, and chopped. The stray "2 cups sugar 2 cups water" at the end belongs to the next recipe on the page.
- The ingredient list, untangled2 cups water, 1 cup sugar, 1¾ cups tomatoes, 3 tablespoons lemon juice, 3 apples (cored, pared, chopped), a piece of ginger root, 3 tablespoons Maraschino. Nothing is missing; the columns simply interleaved.
- Maraschino means the liqueurIn a recipe of this period this is maraschino cordial, a clear cherry-pit liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. Luxardo or Maraska is what the recipe intends; the modern jarred syrup will read as candy.
- TomatoesCanned tomatoes with their juice, or peeled ripe fresh ones. Fresh out-of-season supermarket tomatoes will make a thin, dull punch; canned San Marzano-style are closer to the period's cooked tomato flavor.
- "Freeze to a mush"This is the hinge. The mixture should be granular and barely holding together, not churned smooth like ice cream. In a home freezer, pour into a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for 2 to 3 hours.
- Add the cordial coldThe Maraschino goes in after sieving, off the heat, so the alcohol and aroma survive. Alcohol also lowers the freezing point, which is part of why the texture stays slushy rather than setting hard.
- The gingerA thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger root, unpeeled, cooked whole with the fruit and removed by the sieve. Ground ginger is not a substitute here; it will cloud the punch and settle.
- Cooking timeThirty-five minutes at a bare simmer is right for the apples to break down enough to push through a sieve. Keep the heat low and stir; a hard boil will scorch the sugar against the pan.
- Yield and serviceThe finished punch runs to something over a quart; serve in small glasses. A frozen punch of this kind was a mid-meal course rather than a dessert.
Frozen punches occupy a specific slot in nineteenth-century American formal dining: served partway through a long dinner, ostensibly to refresh the palate before the roast, and often flavored with a spirit or cordial so that the course read as a drink rather than a sweet. "German punch" is a menu name rather than a geographic claim; a tomato base like this one may look startling now, but tomatoes were commonly treated as a fruit for sweet and acid purposes in the 1890s, and they appear in preserves and marmalades throughout the era's household books. The clue to how it was meant to taste is its kinship with the water ices and sherbets: sharply acidic and cold enough to bite.