Home › Beverages › Ginger-Ale Punch
Ginger-Ale Punch
Juice of 4 lemons
Sugar or sirup to taste
1 pint grape-juice
1 quart ginger ale
Mix fruit-juices and sugar or sirup. Just before serving, add
A simple punch base of lemon and grape juice topped with ginger ale at the last moment. The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, but the missing words are plainly "the ginger ale" — everything else is already in the bowl.
- Quantities in modern termsFour lemons yield roughly 3/4 cup juice; a pint of grape juice is 2 cups and a quart of ginger ale 4 cups. Total volume is about a scant 7 cups.
- Sugar or sirup"Sirup" here means simple syrup — equal parts sugar and water boiled briefly and cooled. It dissolves instantly in cold liquid, where granulated sugar will sit at the bottom of the bowl; make it in advance if you are sweetening a cold punch.
- Grape juicePeriod grape juice meant unfermented Concord juice, sweet and deep purple. Modern white grape juice will make a much blander drink; Concord is the one that matches.
- Ginger ale then and nowMuch early-1900s ginger ale was drier and more sharply gingery than most supermarket brands today. A dry ginger ale, or a ginger beer cut with soda water, likely gets closer to the intended balance.
- The hingeAdd the ginger ale at the table, not in the kitchen. Mixed ahead it goes flat, and the punch loses the prickle that is the whole point of the recipe.
- Chilling without dilutionChill the juice base and the ginger ale separately and thoroughly rather than pouring over loose ice. A single large block of ice, or a frozen ring of grape juice, keeps the punch cold for an hour without watering it.
- TastingSweeten the juice base before the ginger ale goes in, since the soda carries its own sugar. Judge it slightly tarter than you want the finished drink to be.
Ginger-ale punches multiplied in American household books in the years around 1900, and the reasons were commercial as much as social: bottled ginger ale and pasteurized, unfermented grape juice had both become reliable pantry goods, the latter closely associated with the temperance movement, which promoted it as a respectable substitute for wine at receptions and church socials. Recipe collections of the period were aimed at exactly the readership that hosted such gatherings — a card party or a wedding breakfast without a bar. A punch of this kind cost little, could be assembled from shelf-stable bottles, and gave a table something festive to look at.