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Russian Punch
Take the juice from five lemons and five oranges, and over the rinds pour a quart of boiling water. Drain, and to it add a quart of sugar. Boil for five minutes and cool. Add the juice of the lemons and oranges, a pint of tea, two wineglasses of sherry and one wine-glass of rum. Serve in glasses filled with shaved ice.
A citrus-and-tea punch built on a quick oleo-saccharum-style rind infusion. The measurements are all by volume in the older style, so the sugar in particular needs translating.
- A quart of sugarThis is a volume measure, not a weight: 4 cups of granulated sugar, roughly 1 lb 12 oz. Dissolved into a quart of water it gives a heavy syrup, which is why the finished punch is diluted with a great deal of ice.
- WineglassesA wineglass in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks is usually reckoned at 2 fl oz, so this calls for about 1/2 cup sherry and 1/4 cup rum in something under three quarts of liquid. That is a light hand by modern punch standards; taste before adding more.
- The rinds are the pointPour the boiling water over the peels only; the recipe gives no steeping time, saying merely to drain. Keeping the white pith and the juiced pulp out of it will help, since prolonged contact can turn the infusion bitter.
- A pint of teaTwo cups of brewed tea, cooled; the recipe does not specify the type or the strength. The tannin plausibly keeps all that sugar from tasting flat.
- Boil the syrup, then stopFive minutes at a full boil is enough to dissolve and thicken slightly. Cool it completely before the juice, tea and spirits go in, or you will cook off the aromatics you just extracted.
- Shaved iceThe original presumably means ice shaved from a block, which melts fast and dilutes as it goes. Crushed ice behaves much the same way; large cubes will dilute less, leaving the punch sweeter.
- YieldRoughly 2 1/2 to 3 quarts of punch before ice, which fills 10 to 12 glasses. It can be mixed a day ahead and refrigerated, holding back the ice until serving.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick. The name attached to punches of this kind is largely decorative: "Russian" in American and English recipe books of the period often signalled tea, which had a strong association with Russian hospitality and the samovar, rather than any documented Russian original. The construction itself is older than the book — citrus peel steeped to extract its oils, sweetened heavily, then cut with a liquid and a small measure of spirits — and belongs to the tradition of the eighteenth-century English punch bowl. Ice is part of its character: by 1911 shaved ice was readily available to American households, and this punch leans on it for both dilution and chill.