Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Kirsch Punch
Kirsch Punch
Put in a dish one-fourth pound of powdered sugar with one pint of cold water, grate in the rind of a small lemon, squeezing in the juice of one and one-half good-sized ones, and beat well together with the spatula for five minutes; add one gill of kirsch, mix a little more, and strain through a sieve into a freezer. Place the lid on and lay it in an ice-tub, filling the freezer all around with broken ice mixed slightly with rock salt, and turn the handle as briskly as possible for two minutes. Lift up the lid and with a wooden spoon detach the punch from the sides and bottom of the freezer. Re-cover it and turn the handle briskly for three minutes more; uncover again and detach the punch the same as before, being careful that no ice or salt drops in. Put the lid on and repeat the same operation three times more. When ready, serve in half a dozen small punch glasses.
This is a frozen punch — a slushy, spoonable ice served between courses or after the roast, not a drink poured from a pitcher. Everything about it hinges on the alcohol, which keeps the mixture from ever setting hard.
- A gill of kirschOne gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Kirsch is clear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit and stones; the sweet red "cherry brandy" liqueurs are not a substitute and will throw the sugar balance.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means finely granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will leave the punch cloudy and slightly pasty.
- The freezerA hand-crank churn: an inner metal canister set in a wooden tub packed with ice and salt. A modern ice cream maker with a frozen bowl does much the same work; the repeated "turn briskly, then detach from the sides" cycle is Oscar describing by hand what a machine paddle does continuously.
- Ice and saltRock salt makes the ice bath colder than plain ice, which is why the mixture freezes at all against an alcohol content of roughly 7 percent by volume once the kirsch is diluted by the water, sugar and juice. Coarse salt only — and the warning about salt dropping in is worth heeding, since stray grains will taste in the finished punch.
- Why it never sets firmWith a full gill of spirit the punch stays at a granular, half-frozen slush no matter how long you churn. That is the intended texture. If it is stiff enough to scoop like ice cream, the kirsch has been shorted.
- Still-freezing insteadWithout a churn, pour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 20 to 30 minutes until evenly grainy. Roughly two to three hours; the result is coarser than the churned version but correct in spirit.
- LemonThe juice of one and a half good-sized lemons is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons, plus the grated zest of a small one. Zest before juicing, and keep the white pith out — it is bitter.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half before freezing, and Oscar's six small punch glasses means about 3 to 4 ounces each. Serve immediately; it slumps quickly at room temperature.
Frozen punches like this one belong to the long, formal dinner of the late nineteenth century, where an entremet of iced spirits was set down midway through the meal — the Roman punch, kirsch punch or rum sherbet whose stated purpose was to refresh the palate and, less politely, to give the guests a pause before the roast. Kirschwasser, distilled from small black cherries and their stones in the Black Forest and Alsace, was a standard bar and pastry-kitchen spirit in American hotels of the era and gave a cleaner, drier ice than rum. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and his 1896 book is often taken as reflecting the hotel's practice; the presence of several such punches, each with the same laborious hand-cranking instructions, is a reminder that every ice on a Waldorf menu was frozen by hand, by someone turning a handle in a tub of salted ice.