No. 3714

Champagne, Claret and Rum Punch; Dessert Drinks

Punch au Champagne, Bordeaux et Rhum; Boissons Pour le Dessert

Champagne.—Three quarts of champagne wine, two quarts or bottles of Sauterne wine, three bottles of soda water, one gill of Curacoa and fresh fruits in season.

Claret.—Four bottles of Bordeaux, one quart of water, one pound of sugar, one gill of Curacoa and kirsch, half of each, half a gill of lemon juice and fresh fruits in season, such as cherries, strawberries, pineapple or raspberries.

Rum.—Two quarts of St. Croix rum, one pint of Jamaica rum, three pints of water, one pound of sugar, one gill of lemon juice and fresh fruits in season.

A delicious drink is currant juice, grenadine or orgeat, in large glasses, and moistened with ice cold water.

Dessert Drinks.—Fine champagne brandy, iced eckau kummel, iced cream of peppermint (creme de menthe), Chartreuse, yellow and green, and kirsch.

Pousse Cafe.—The pousse cafe is a drink composed of four kinds of liquor of different color; that is to say, white cream of peppermint, green Chartreuse, cream of cocoa and brandy. These four liquors are poured into a glass tumbler in such a way that they remain in distinct layers, which is done by carefully pouring the above liquors, one after the other, against the side of the glass; thus the liquors flow down gently without mixing.

← No. 3713 Lemonade or with Syrup and Orangeade The Wine Cellar, Punches & Drinks No. 3715 Claudius Punch and Wine Punch—Hot →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three punch bowls and a list of after-dinner liqueurs, written for a restaurant that expected to serve thirty people at once. The proportions scale down cleanly; the only technical instruction is the layering of the pousse-café.

A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — 4 tablespoons, a quarter cup.
YieldThe champagne punch comes to roughly six quarts before ice and serves about thirty in punch cups; the claret about five quarts; the rum punch, at nearly two-thirds spirit, is the strongest of the three and should be poured in small cups. Quarter the quantities for a domestic party.
SauterneMost likely sweet Sauternes or a comparable botrytised white, though the name was also used loosely in this period; it is the only real source of sweetness in the champagne punch, which has no sugar added. A dry white will leave the bowl thin and sour.
St. Croix and Jamaica rumSt. Croix rum was a lighter, drier Virgin Islands style, now largely represented by Cruzan; the Jamaica pint is there for funk and aroma, so use a pot-still Jamaican rather than a second light rum.
Curacoa, kummel, orgeatCuracoa is curaçao — use a decent dry orange liqueur, not the blue bar syrup. "Iced eckau kummel" is Ekau kümmel, a caraway liqueur from the Baltic; any kümmel stands in. Orgeat is the almond-and-orange-flower syrup still sold for tiki drinks, and the currant-juice, grenadine and orgeat suggestion is simply a syrup topped with iced water — a nonalcoholic option for the same table.
Dissolve the sugar firstA pound of granulated sugar dissolves slowly and grudgingly in cold wine. Easiest is to make it up as a syrup with the water called for — the quart in the claret, the three pints in the rum punch — cool it, then combine.
Chill, then add sodaEverything should go into the bowl already cold, and the three bottles of soda water last, at the moment of serving. Ice the bowl rather than the punch where you can; loose ice dilutes a champagne punch fast.
Pousse-café layeringLayers hold by density, which tracks sugar content, not by the order printed here. Pour the heaviest first — crème de cacao, then white crème de menthe, then green Chartreuse, with brandy floated last — and run each down the back of a bar spoon or the inside wall of the glass. Modern brands vary in sweetness, so test the order with a few drops before committing to the glass.
Fresh fruits in seasonSliced pineapple, strawberries, raspberries and stoned cherries all work; add them 30 minutes to an hour ahead so they perfume the punch without going to mush. Citrus wheels left in overnight turn bitter from the pith.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry reads like a service list rather than a recipe: three standing punch formulas, a nonalcoholic alternative, and the range of liqueurs a waiter would wheel out with the coffee. The word punch is generally traced to Sanskrit and Hindi pa tc, five, for the five components of the drink Englishmen met in India — spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice — and all three bowls here still show that skeleton, with wine standing in for the spirit in two of them. The pousse-caf\é, a piece of bar theatre built on the fact that sweeter liqueurs are denser, was a fixture of the later nineteenth-century trade and appears in Jerry Thomas's bartending manuals; that Ranhofer includes it among the dessert drinks says something about how far the restaurant bar had encroached on the dining room by the end of the century.