Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Punch Hollandaise
Punch Hollandaise
4 cups water Rind one lemon 1⅓ cups sugar ⅓ cup lemon juice 1 can grated pineapple 1/4 cup brandy 2 tablespoons gin .
Cook sugar, water, and lemon rind fifteen minutes, add lemon juice and pineapple, cool, strain, freeze to a mush, add strong liquors, and continue freezing. Serve in frappé glasses on a plate covered with a doily. 3½ cups water 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup lemon juice 1/2 cup orange juice
A frozen punch meant to be served mid-meal as a palate cleanser, not as dessert. The transcription carries some obvious typesetting slips, and the alcohol behaves in ways that matter to the freezing.
- The two sets of quantitiesThe printed page gives 1⅓ cups sugar to 4 cups water, and the trailing 3½ cups water, as our text now reads. That second list belongs to a separate, plainer formula printed alongside — water, sugar, lemon and orange juice, with no pineapple or spirits.
- Two recipes, not oneThe final line is a separate formula that has run into the first. Treat the pineapple-and-brandy version and the lemon-orange version as alternatives rather than trying to combine them.
- Add the spirits late, and no earlierThis is the hinge. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so brandy and gin stirred in at the start will stop the mixture setting properly. Freeze to a mush first, then add them and finish freezing.
- Canned grated pineappleCan sizes of the period varied, and the recipe specifies none; something in the region of 2 cups, packed in syrup, is a reasonable working assumption. Modern crushed pineapple in juice is the closest match; if using pineapple in heavy syrup, cut the sugar back accordingly.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain removes the lemon rind and the pineapple fibre, leaving a clear ice. If you prefer the texture of the fruit, strain out only the rind — the result is coarser and more like a granita.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe original assumes a salt-and-ice bucket freezer worked by hand. An ice cream machine gives the same result; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every twenty minutes until it holds a mush.
- Serving"Frappé glasses" are small stemmed glasses; the doily is part of the conventional service. Serve immediately — the alcohol means it slumps quickly at room temperature.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts, which at the intended portion of a few spoonfuls serves a dozen or more as a between-course.
Frozen punches occupied a fixed slot in the long formal dinners of the late nineteenth century, served after the entrées to clear the palate before the roast — a role variously called the sorbet, the Roman punch, or, when spirits were involved, simply the punch course. "Hollandaise" here has nothing to do with the egg-and-butter sauce; the name is generally traced to Holland gin, or genever, the Dutch spirit. The era's appetite for elaborate table service coincided with a time when mechanical refrigeration was still uncommon in homes — the common practice was to freeze these in a wooden bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand. Canned grated pineapple, which the recipe assumes without comment, was itself a fairly recent convenience, Hawaiian canning having expanded sharply in this period.