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Champagne Punch
Prepare one and a half teacups Oolong tea and put aside until cool, but do not place on ice. Pour into a three-quart champagne bowl one pony each eurak, brandy and maraschino, two wineglasses Rhine wine, a bottle cold plain soda and quart champagne. Strain the prepared tea into bowl, thoroughly mix the whole well together with a ladle, then add a lump of clear, clean ice of about a pound. Peel a sound, medium-sized, ripe banana, slice it in thin slices and scatter all over the punch. Neatly peel and slice a fine, juicy orange, spread slices over punch and serve in punch glasses.
A cold punch built directly in the bowl, with tea as its backbone rather than sugar syrup. The measures are bar measures of the 1900s, so translate them before you start.
- The measuresA pony is 1 fl oz and a wineglass of the period about 2 fl oz; a teacup is variously reckoned from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so the tea comes out somewhere between 6 and 9 oz. The build is 1 oz each arrack, brandy and maraschino, 4 oz Rhine wine, the tea, a bottle of soda and a quart of champagne (a standard modern bottle is a little short of that).
- "Eurak"Almost certainly a compositor's mangling of arrack, the rice- or palm-based spirit that flavoured English punch for two centuries. Batavia arrack is the historically correct bottle; a light unaged rum is the nearest common substitute.
- Rhine wineA dry to off-dry German Riesling. Nineteenth-century "Rhine wine" was generally low in alcohol and high in acid, which is what keeps this punch from tasting flabby, so avoid anything sweet and heavy.
- MaraschinoThe clear, dry cherry-pit liqueur (Luxardo and similar), not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. The jarred cherries borrowed the name but not the character of the liqueur, and swapping them ruins the drink.
- The tea, and why it must not be icedCool the Oolong at room temperature. Hard chilling makes tea cloud as its caffeine and polyphenols complex and drop out, which is the likeliest reason for the instruction, though the original does not say. Brew it on the weak side; strong tea turns astringent once the champagne acid is added.
- The iceA one-pound block, not cubes: the point is slow dilution over a bowl that sits on a table for an hour. A large ice ring frozen in a cake tin or a bowl of water does the same job in a modern freezer.
- The fruitAdd the banana and orange at the moment of serving. Sliced banana in an acidic punch browns and goes soft within twenty minutes, and it will muddy the punch if it sits.
- YieldSomething closer to two quarts of liquid before ice, which is roughly fourteen to fifteen punch-glass servings of 4 oz.
Punch reached England from the Indian Ocean trade in the seventeenth century, the name generally traced to the Hindi and Persian word for five, for the classic five parts of spirit, citrus, sugar, water and spice; arrack, the Asian spirit that gives this recipe its odd misspelled "eurak," was the original base. By the time The International Cook Book appeared, punch had been rebuilt around champagne for hotel and banquet service, and the arrack survives here as a vestige of the older formula rather than the main event. The tea is the other survival: cooled tea appears in Victorian and Edwardian punches, supplying tannin and body without sweetness. The banana points to the recipe's period, the fruit having become a familiar garnish in American and European kitchens as steamer cargoes brought it within reach.