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Chocolate Punch
Place in a saucepan a half pound granulated sugar, four ounces grated sweet chocolate, one quart lukewarm water, the juice of three medium lemons, the grated rind of one lemon and half teaspoon vanilla essence. Set on the fire and briskly mix with a wooden spoon for five minutes, remove, let cool off and strain through a Chinese strainer into a small ice-cream freezer. Cover the freezer, pack with broken ice mixed with rock salt, and freeze for thirty-five minutes, remove, fill up six sherbet glasses and serve.
This is a frozen water ice, not a drink: a lemon-and-chocolate sorbet churned in a hand-crank freezer and served in sherbet glasses between courses. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the terms and the freezing method need translating.
- Keep it below a boilThe five minutes on the fire is only to dissolve the sugar and melt the chocolate into the water. A hard boil will drive off the lemon and vanilla aromatics; hold it at a bare steam and stir constantly.
- Sweet chocolatePeriod "sweet chocolate" is a sweetened eating chocolate, less bitter than modern bittersweet. Four ounces is about 115 g; a semi-sweet chocolate is the closest ready match. Unsweetened baking chocolate will throw the balance off badly.
- MeasuresHalf a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 1/8 cups (227 g); a quart of water is 4 cups (about 950 ml). Three medium lemons yield roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of juice, which is a wide range for a mixture this lean, so taste before freezing.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Its job here is to catch the grated rind and any undissolved chocolate solids; any fine sieve or a sieve lined with a single layer of cheesecloth does the same.
- Chill before churning"Let cool off" means fully cold. Refrigerate the base to about 40F before it goes into the freezer canister, or the churning time will run far past thirty-five minutes and the texture will coarsen.
- Ice and saltFor a crank freezer, pack the bucket with crushed ice and rock salt in roughly 6 parts ice to 1 part salt by volume, adding more as it melts. In a modern machine, expect 20-30 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- Texture and timingThere is no cream, egg or alcohol here, so this sets hard and icy and will not hold well. Serve it straight from the churn, or let it soften 5 minutes in the refrigerator if it has been stored.
- YieldSix sherbet glasses, which in this period means small stemmed glasses. As a modern dessert portion it is closer to four servings.
"Punch" on a turn-of-the-century menu did not always mean something poured from a bowl. By the 1900s the word had attached itself to a frozen ice, usually sharp with citrus and often laced with rum or wine, served in a small glass partway through a long dinner to reset the palate before the roast; Roman punch is the best-known example of the form. This chocolate version drops the spirits and keeps the structure: heavy on lemon, thin-bodied, frozen hard, and portioned into six little glasses rather than dished as a dessert. The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition of Alexander Filippini, where that mid-meal ice was a fixture of formal service, and the recipe's assumption that a household owns a small ice-cream freezer and can lay hands on broken ice and rock salt says a good deal about what a well-equipped kitchen looked like before mechanical refrigeration.