Home › Pickles and Catsups › Mint Sangaree
Mint Sangaree
Follow recipe given for Claret Punch adding one-half bunch of mint leaves, bruised in the punch. Garnish with sprigs of mint.
A two-line variation that depends entirely on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book, so the first job is reconstructing what the base is meant to be.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here works without the book's Claret Punch, which supplies the wine and the rest of the proportions. Read that first; this page only tells you what to add to it.
- Claret means red BordeauxIn an American book of this period claret is a dry red Bordeaux or a domestic wine sold in imitation of one. Any dry, medium-bodied red works; save nothing expensive, since the sugar and citrus will flatten its detail.
- Half a bunch of mintBunch sizes vary a great deal, so the measure is not a fixed one. Judge the quantity by taste against the volume of punch you have made rather than by count.
- Bruised, not muddled to shredsPress the leaves against the side of the bowl with a spoon until they smell strongly, then stop. Overworking the leaves is generally held to make the drink taste grassy and turn it slightly green.
- Steeping timeThe recipe gives none, and leaves left in the punch will go on extracting, so taste as you go and lift them out when the flavour is where you want it. The garnish sprigs go in at the last moment, unbruised.
- Spearmint, not peppermintNineteenth-century American "mint" in drinks is spearmint, the julep herb. Peppermint carries far more menthol and reads as confectionery against wine.
- Serve genuinely coldA sangaree is a chilled drink; the punch should be assembled over ice and the glasses cold. Warm, it tastes only of sugar and alcohol.
Sangaree is the English rendering of the Spanish sangría, and the word turns up in British and West Indian usage well before it settles into American bar books: sweetened wine, sometimes fortified, iced, and usually dusted with nutmeg. By the late nineteenth century American drink lists distinguished a sangaree from a punch mainly by its simplicity, though household books like this one cheerfully collapse the two by building the sangaree straight onto a punch recipe. The mint here is often said to echo the julep, the defining American use of the herb, and it marks the drink as something for warm-weather entertaining.","removed":"Closed the stray quotation mark; hedged the julep-borrowing claim; deleted the inference about Butterick's intended scale and bowl-service households."}