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Strawberry Punch
Pick the stems from one quart of freshly-gathered ripe strawberries, put the fruit into a deep dish, cover them with two and one-half breakfast cupfuls of sugar, and leave till a thick syrup has formed. Pass the strawberries and syrup through a fine hair-sieve into a freezer and mix with them one teacupful of sweet wine and one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of water; stir until mixed, and leave until frozen. Serve the punch in small glasses.
This is a frozen punch — a slushy wine ice served between courses or with the roast, not a drink poured from a pitcher. Almost everything that matters is in the sugar-to-liquid ratio, which is what keeps it soft enough to spoon.
- The hinge: sugar keeps it scoopableThe sugar here is not only for sweetness — it depresses the freezing point so the punch stays slushy rather than setting into a solid block. Cutting it substantially will give you a strawberry brick.
- Breakfast cup and teacupA breakfast cup runs about 10 fl oz, a teacup about 5 to 6 fl oz, though neither was standardised. Read it as roughly 3 cups of sugar, ¾ cup of wine and about 1¾ cups of water; the wine and water can be adjusted by taste, the sugar less freely.
- "Leave till a thick syrup has formed"This is maceration, not cooking. An hour at room temperature or two to three hours refrigerated will draw enough juice out of ripe berries; the sugar should be largely dissolved before you sieve.
- Hair sieveA fine-meshed sieve of woven horsehair. Any fine mesh strainer works, pressed through with a ladle or flexible spatula. Straining removes the seeds and the pulp strings — skip it and the texture goes gritty.
- "Into a freezer"In 1896 that meant a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer: a metal can turned in a bucket of ice and rock salt, with a dasher scraping the sides. An ice-cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth one.
- Sweet wineThe recipe does not specify. A sweet Madeira, sherry, Marsala or Sauternes-style wine all suit it; the alcohol also softens the freeze, so a fortified wine gives a looser punch than a light one.
- Strawberries"Freshly-gathered" is doing real work — the recipe is uncooked, so the flavour is entirely the fruit's. Pale, underripe supermarket berries will need the sweetest wine you can find to compensate. Frozen berries, thawed, macerate acceptably.
- YieldComfortably more than a quart once the fruit, syrup, wine and water are combined. Serve immediately; it firms up hard in a modern freezer and will need 15 minutes on the counter if held.
Frozen punches like this one belonged to the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth century, where a wine ice arrived midway through the meal \sorbet or punch romaine course — to reset the palate before the roast. The Waldorf, which opened in 1893 on Fifth Avenue, built its reputation on exactly this kind of service, and Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name the 1896 book carries, is often said to have drawn on the hotel's working practice, though the book gathers material from a wider range of sources, including domestic recipes, and Tschirky was not the kitchen's chef. The recipe's reliance on an ice-and-salt freezer is a reminder that a large hotel of the period bought or cut ice by the ton; the strawberry course was seasonal in a way that is hard to feel now, tied to the few weeks of local berries arriving in the markets.