Sweeten a pint of claret to taste, add to it one gill of maraschino or Curacoa, one pint of soda water, a few mint leaves, fresh strawberries or raspberries and pieces of pineapple. Cucumbers or borage leaves may be added.
A la Willard's.—Crush one pound of strawberries, add four spoonfuls of powdered sugar, the juice of one lemon, a pint of whipped cream and a bottleful of soda water.
Two summer cups from Ranhofer's wine-cellar chapter: a conventional claret cup, and a strawberry-cream version named for a hotel bar. Neither is difficult, but both assume a pitcher of ice and a fruit larder in front of you.
Claret cup belongs to the British summer — a diluted, iced, fruited wine drink poured at cricket matches, regattas and garden parties from the mid-nineteenth century onward — and Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, files it here among the cups and punches that a well-run house was expected to produce on demand. The "à la Willard's" tag is generally taken to point to Willard's Hotel in Washington, whose bar and dining room were fixtures of political life in the Civil War era and after; naming a drink for a rival establishment is often said to have been common in these books, a shorthand for a house style rather than a claim of authorship. The reliance on soda water is itself a period marker: bottled and siphon-charged water had become cheap and reliable, which is what let a cup be assembled cold at the last minute instead of being brewed as a punch hours ahead.