No. 3518

Stanley Punch

Punch a la Stanley

If for twelve guests have one quart of syrup at thirty-two degrees, the juice of four lemons, a quart of boiling water having a pound of freshly roasted coffee infused therein and half a vanilla bean; pour the infusion into the preparation, let steep together for two hours, keeping it well closed. Bring the composition to twenty-two degrees and strain through a sieve; freeze while incorporating two Italian meringue egg-whites (No. 140), one gill of kirsch and a gill of maraschino. Arrange the punch inside of a goblet beside which is a heron made of gum paste (No. 3624) surrounded by grasses.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A frozen punch from the Delmonico's kitchen, meant to be served in a goblet as a spoonable ice rather than a drink. Almost everything that needs decoding here is in the two numbers: 32 degrees and 22 degrees.

Degrees means Baumé, not temperatureThe readings are sugar density taken with a saccharometer (hydrometer). Syrup at 32° Baumé is roughly 59 percent sugar by weight — about 3 lb sugar dissolved in a quart of water, not the 2 lb that makes an everyday simple syrup. Bringing the finished composition down to 22° Baumé, around 40 percent sugar, is done by adding water until the hydrometer reads correctly.
Why the density mattersAt 22° Baumé the mixture freezes to a soft, scrapeable ice; much sweeter and it will not set at all, much less and it freezes into a solid block. A refractometer or a syrup hydrometer is the only honest way to hit the mark — there is no reliable eyeball substitute.
A pound of coffee to a quart of waterThis is a concentrate, not a beverage: roughly eight times the strength of ordinary drip coffee. Ground coffee over-extracts badly over a two-hour steep; whole or coarsely cracked beans in the boiling water are closer to what the infusion wants.
Gills and other measuresA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. So the punch takes half a cup of kirsch and half a cup of maraschino, both added at the freezing stage.
The alcohol keeps it slackA cup of spirits in a quart-scale batch drops the freezing point sharply. This will never set hard in a domestic freezer, and it is not supposed to — it should mound softly on a spoon. Churn it, then hold it in the coldest part of the freezer and serve within a few hours.
Italian meringue, No. 140Egg whites beaten with hot syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, usually given as around 240F; the recipe itself only cross-refers to No. 140. The hot syrup partly cooks the whites but does not reliably pasteurise them. Fold the meringue in partway through churning, once the base has begun to thicken; added at the start it simply deflates.
Half a vanilla beanSplit it and steep it with the coffee in the boiling water, as the recipe directs.
The heronGum paste, made from sugar and gum tragacanth, and purely a table ornament — inedible in practice and irrelevant to the flavour. Skip it without loss.
YieldRanhofer sets this at twelve guests; on the quantities given that works out at a goblet-sized portion of six or seven fluid ounces each.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some three decades running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its punch section belongs to the punch a la romaine tradition — a half-frozen, spirit-laced ice served midway through a long dinner to reset the palate before the roast. Ranhofer gives dozens of them, each distinguished by a flavour base and a sugar-paste tableau, and many Delmonico's dishes take their names from patrons, occasions and public figures of the moment; the heron and grasses set beside this one point to a decorative theme rather than any culinary meaning. The coffee base is the interesting part: coffee ices were fashionable in the second half of the nineteenth century, and kirsch and maraschino are both cherry spirits, so pairing that bitterness with them is a characteristically Ranhofer piece of balancing.