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Roman Punch
Pour into a freezing-pot one quart of peach water-ice, a bottle of dry champagne, two wineglassfuls of noyau, and the strained juice of four oranges. Color it a delicate pink with a few drops of cochineal, and flavor with essence of vanilla. Work the mixture until almost frozen, then add gradually the whites of three eggs made into Italian meringue; work all together quickly until smooth, and then serve.
A frozen punch meant to be served mid-meal in small glasses, not a dessert ice. The controlling fact is the alcohol: a full bottle of champagne plus liqueur will never freeze hard, and it is not supposed to.
- Freezing-potThe freezing-pot is the canister of a hand-crank ice cream freezer packed in ice and rock salt. A modern churn works; so does a shallow metal pan in the freezer, scraped with a fork every twenty minutes.
- Texture is the point"Work the mixture until almost frozen" means a soft slush. With this much alcohol it will not set firmer than that, and it must be served straight from the machine — it slumps within minutes at the table.
- WineglassfulIn nineteenth-century American recipes a wineglass is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so two wineglassfuls of noyau is roughly 1/2 cup.
- NoyauCrème de noyaux, an almond-scented liqueur historically made from peach and apricot kernels. Modern bottlings are generally flavored rather than kernel-made, but are the nearest substitute; amaretto is sweeter and heavier but will pass.
- Peach water-iceA dairy-free sorbet of peach purée and sugar syrup, churned. Commercial peach sorbet substitutes directly for the quart; look for one without added cream.
- CochinealCochineal is carmine, the red extract of a scale insect, still sold as food coloring. It is neither vegetarian nor free of allergy risk for a few people; any red coloring gives the same pale pink, and a few drops is genuinely all that is wanted.
- Italian meringueWhites beaten while a sugar syrup cooked to about 240F is poured in. Since the punch is never cooked afterward, use pasteurized whites, and fold the meringue in fast — overworking melts the ice and deflates the foam.
- VanillaThe recipe gives no quantity; 'flavor with essence of vanilla' implies a very small amount, and a scant half teaspoon of modern extract is a reasonable reading. More than that fights the noyau and the orange.
- YieldUpwards of two and a half quarts once the meringue is in, which is a dozen or more small punch glasses as an intermezzo, or fewer, larger servings if treated as a dessert ice.
Roman punch was a fixture of the long formal dinner in the second half of the nineteenth century, served frozen before the rôti as a palate-clearing intermezzo — the course the French menus called sorbet or punch à la romaine. The connection to Rome is decorative rather than documented; the form is a French one, a sweetened water-ice loosened with wine or spirits and lightened with meringue. In American memory it is bound up with the state dinner: it is often said that Roman punch was the one alcoholic item to survive the temperance-minded White House table, on the grounds that a frozen ice was not quite a drink. Oscar Tschirky's version, with champagne, noyau, orange and a blush of cochineal, is the Waldorf at its most confidently late-Victorian, where a mid-meal ice was expected to be tinted as carefully as it was flavored.