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Roman Punch
4 cups water. 2 cups sugar. ½ cup lemon juice 1/2 cup orange juice ½ cup tea infusion 1/2 cup rum Prepare and freeze same as Cardinal Punch.
A frozen punch rather than a dessert ice — thin, tart and meant to be served in small glasses partway through a long dinner. Note that the instructions are incomplete on their own.
- The cross-reference is the recipeEverything that makes this work — the sugar syrup, the water, the freezing directions — sits in the Cardinal Punch entry elsewhere in the same section. Read that first; as printed here there is no sweetener at all, and neat citrus juice with rum will not freeze to a pleasant texture.
- Sugar is doing structural workIn a frozen punch the syrup is not just for flavour: sugar and alcohol both depress the freezing point and keep the mixture from setting into a solid block of ice. If you are working out proportions yourself, a syrup of roughly a cup of sugar dissolved in an equal volume of water is a reasonable starting point for this quantity of juice, and taste the unfrozen mixture — it should be noticeably sweeter than you want, since cold mutes sweetness.
- "Tea infusion"Presumably plain black tea, brewed and cooled; the recipe does not say which. Brew it at ordinary drinking strength or a little above; over-steeped tea turns bitter and astringent once frozen, and the tannin will fight the lemon.
- The rumThe type is unspecified; a dark Jamaica-style rum is a reasonable choice. Half a cup across this volume is a modest amount, but if you increase it the punch will refuse to freeze firm and will stay slushy at freezer temperature.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe original expects a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer. A modern ice cream machine works; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for two to three hours, which gives the coarse granita texture these punches actually had.
- Yield and servingThe juices, tea and rum come to about a quart before the syrup from the Cardinal Punch recipe is added. Serve in stemmed glasses or small cups, soft rather than hard-frozen, and let it sit a few minutes out of the freezer if it has set too firm.
Roman punch belongs to a vanished course: the frozen punch or sorbet served between the roast and the game at formal nineteenth-century dinners, ostensibly to refresh the palate and, less ostensibly, to give the guests a breather in a meal of eight or ten courses. It is generally traced to French service of the early 1800s and it appears on a great many American state and banquet menus later in the century; stories of rum-laced Roman punch reaching White House tables circulated widely, though the details are hard to pin down. Fannie Farmer files it among the ices rather than the beverages, and builds it on a tea infusion: tea gave body and a faint tannic grip to what would otherwise be sweetened lemonade. The punch course was already fading from private dinners by the time of the book's later editions, surviving mainly at weddings and public banquets.