No. 3509

Imperial Punch

Punch a l'Imperiale

Put three gills of pineapple juice in a vessel with the juice of two lemons and the peel of one orange, also half an ounce of team infused in a pint of water, three gills of rum, two gills of brandy, one gill of kirsch and one gill of maraschino; bring this composition to sixteen degrees, then freeze. When frozen to an ice add half as much Italian meringue (No. 140), fill the inside of the crowns and serve. These crowns are made of gum paste, (No. 3624) having cardboard boxes fitted into the center.

← No. 3508 Favorite Punch Ices & Ice Creams No. 3510 Cordial Punch—Iced →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's imperial punch is not a dessert ice but a mid-dinner spoom — a barely frozen, heavily spirited slush lightened with meringue. Almost everything that can go wrong with it comes down to sugar density and alcohol load.

The hinge: sixteen degrees"Bring this composition to sixteen degrees" means adding sugar syrup until a Baumé saccharometer reads 16 degrees, roughly 29-30 Brix, or about 30 percent sugar by weight. Ranhofer gives no sugar quantity because he expected you to measure the density; without a hydrometer or refractometer this figure is genuinely unreproducible by eye, and too little sugar gives a coarse, icy grain while too much stops it setting at all.
GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Three gills of pineapple juice is 1½ cups, three gills of rum the same, and so on — the liquid base before syrup comes to roughly 7½ cups.
"Half an ounce of team"A typographic slip for tea. Half an ounce is about 14 g of loose leaf infused in a pint of water — very strong by modern habit, and deliberately so, since the tannin gives the punch backbone against the sugar. Steep five minutes and strain hard; longer will turn it bitter.
Alcohol and freezingTwenty-eight fluid ounces of rum, brandy, kirsch and maraschino against about thirty ounces of juice and tea puts the mixture somewhere near 15 percent alcohol once the syrup is in, which will not set solid in a domestic ice cream machine. Ranhofer's pot freezer, packed in ice and rock salt, ran well below the freezer-box temperatures we work with. Expect a slush, and either churn in a salt-and-ice bucket or freeze in a shallow tray and rake with a fork.
Italian meringue (No. 140)Egg whites whipped while a hot sugar syrup is poured in. Folding in half the volume of the frozen punch is what turns a granita into a spoom - pale, foamy and about half again its bulk. Fold at the last moment; it deflates as it stands.
The crownsThe gum paste crowns of No. 3624 are pastillage - a hard-dried sugar-and-gum paste - and are display pieces, not eating. The cardboard box inside holds the ice so the sugar shell does not dissolve. A chilled glass bowl or individual coupes serve the same purpose.
Yield and serviceAbout two quarts before the meringue, three after: twelve to sixteen servings. In the service of the period this punch came in the middle of the dinner, before the roast, in small glasses to be taken with a spoon, not at the end of the meal.

A Little History

The frozen spirit punch served in the middle of a long dinner is a relative of punch a la romaine, which by the later nineteenth century was a common course in French service; Ranhofer's book carries a whole run of them - favorite, cardinal, imperial, cordial. The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, where Ranhofer cooked for some three decades, and these punches are the clearest surviving trace of a dining pattern that has since vanished: a cold, alcoholic, half-frozen pause in the middle of a very long meal. The maraschino and kirsch were both imported and costly. The pastillage crown with its hidden cardboard box is typical of the period's piece-montee cookery, where the vessel was built to be looked at and thrown away.