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Veranda Punch
Juice of 3 lemons
1 cup tea infusion
Juice of 2 oranges
1 pint ginger ale
½ cup sugar sirup
1 pint charged water
Mix fruit-juice and sugar sirup. Add the hot tea. Cool, and, when ready to serve, add ginger ale and charged water. Thin slices of lemon and orange may be used for a garnish.
A straightforward non-alcoholic summer punch. The only real decisions are the strength of the tea and how much dilution you want from the ice.
- Sugar sirupPeriod sugar syrup is usually equal parts sugar and water by volume, boiled until clear and cooled, though heavier syrups were also used. Half a cup of a 1:1 syrup carries roughly a third of a cup of sugar, so the finished punch is only lightly sweet by modern standards; taste before serving and add more syrup rather than granulated sugar, which dissolves slowly in a cold drink.
- Tea infusionA cup of ordinary black tea brewed at drinking strength. Steep it no longer than three or four minutes: tea held on the leaves gets tannic and turns bitter and cloudy once chilled.
- Charged waterPlain carbonated water, sold then in siphons and bottles. Club soda or seltzer is the direct equivalent; skip tonic, which adds quinine and more sugar.
- Add the tea hotThe hot tea is poured over the juice and syrup so everything dissolves and marries, then the mixture is cooled. Do not add the ginger ale or soda until the base is thoroughly cold, or the carbonation will be gone before it reaches the glass.
- Citrus quantitiesThree lemons give roughly a third to a half cup of juice and two oranges about half to two-thirds of a cup, depending on size. Judge by volume rather than by count.
- IceServe over a large block or over ice in the glass rather than stirring crushed ice into the bowl, which waters the punch down within minutes.
- YieldRoughly six and a half cups, or a dozen small punch-cup servings. It doubles and triples without adjustment.
Butterick's beverage chapter belongs to the era when the punch bowl on the porch was a fixture of American hospitality, and the name says exactly where this one was meant to be drunk. Cold tea punches spread widely in the United States in the decades either side of 1900, helped along by temperance sentiment and by the commercial ginger ales and bottled charged waters that made a sparkling drink possible without a cellar or a still. The formula here is the standard one of the type: citrus for acid, syrup for sweetness, tea for body and a faint astringency, and something fizzy added at the last moment. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its household books for the same readership, and recipes like this one assume a hostess with a bowl, a few glasses and guests arriving on a warm afternoon.