Home › The Cook Book › Sauterne Cup
Sauterne Cup
1 quart soda water 2 tablespoons Orange Curaçoa 2 cups Sauterne wine ½ cup sugar (scant) Rind 1/2 orange Mint leaves Rind 1/2 lemon Few slices orange 12 strawberries Add Curaçoa to rind of fruit and sugar; cover, and let stand two hours. Add Sauterne, strain, and stand on ice to chill. Add chilled soda water, mint leaves, slices of orange, and strawberries. The success of cups depends upon the addition of charged water just before serving.
A pre-Prohibition wine cup, closer to a light punch than a cocktail. It is straightforward to make, but two things in the original text need translating before you start.
- The hinge: charge it lastThe recipe says it outright and it is worth repeating. Build and chill the wine base, then add the soda water at the table or immediately before pouring, or the drink arrives flat and tastes merely sweet.
- On the sugarThe printed page gives a scant half cup of sugar, as our text now reads. Even so, sweetness varies with the wine, so start below the full measure -- a quarter to a half cup -- and taste before the soda goes in.
- Sauterne vs. SauternesAround 1900 American labels read "sauterne" and meant a generic sweetish white, not the botrytised dessert wine of Sauternes. A dry-to-off-dry white — Chenin Blanc, an unoaked Semillon blend, a Riesling — gives the balance the recipe assumes, and true Sauternes would need the sugar cut sharply.
- CuraçoaThe old spelling of curaçao, an orange liqueur. Any dry orange curaçao or triple sec works; two tablespoons is one ounce.
- Rind means zest onlyPare the orange and lemon in wide strips with no white pith attached. Two hours of maceration in liqueur and sugar extracts the oils; pith in the mix contributes bitterness that will not strain out.
- Soda waterPlain unsweetened seltzer or club soda. The "charged water" of the period came from siphons, bottled aerated water or a fountain, and was generally briskly carbonated, so use a fresh bottle rather than the end of one.
- "Stand on ice"An icebox instruction: get the strained base thoroughly cold, around 40F, in the refrigerator or a bowl of ice water. A well-chilled base holds carbonation far better than ice cubes dropped into a warm pitcher.
- Mint and fruitAdd the mint whole as garnish and do not muddle it — bruised leaves in a wine cup turn grassy within minutes. The strawberries and orange slices are meant to be looked at and eaten after.
- YieldAbout six cups of finished liquid, or eight or more servings in small punch glasses. It does not keep once carbonated, so mix only what will be drunk.
The "cup" was a fixture of Anglo-American summer entertaining long before the cocktail displaced it: a bottle of wine stretched with charged water, sweetened, scented with citrus peel and a liqueur, and garnished with whatever fruit and herbs the garden offered. Claret cup, cider cup and champagne cup all appear in the same period, built on the identical formula. A beverages chapter sat comfortably in a cookery book aimed at housekeepers because a cup was understood as hospitality rather than drinking — mild, diluted, served from a pitcher to a room. That the sugar is measured out for the maker rather than left to taste is typical of the period's ambition to give exact quantities for things earlier books had left to judgment.