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Claret Cup
Mix in a punch bowl a quart claret, two pony glasses each orange curacao and maracshino, half pony glass Jamaica rum and two large tablespoons sugar. Stir well with ladle, add two bottles Club soda, also a large piece ice, fruits in season and serve in fancy wine glasses.
N.B. Nowadays a number of people are more or less averse to using lemon juice in cups, but if desired the juice of a sound lemon can be added.
A late-Victorian summer punch built on a bottle of red Bordeaux. The measures are bar measures, not kitchen ones, and two of them need translating before you start.
- Pony glassA pony is one fluid ounce, smaller than the jigger of the period (given variously as 1.5 or 2 oz). So two ponies each of curaçao and maraschino means 2 oz of each, and half a pony of rum is about a tablespoon.
- ClaretThe English trade name for red Bordeaux. Taken as a US quart this is 32 oz, appreciably more than a standard 750 ml bottle (about 25 oz) — a bottle plus a quarter. A dry, medium-bodied Bordeaux or a similar Cabernet-Merlot blend suits; nothing oaky or high in alcohol.
- MaraschinoThe clear, dry cherry-pit liqueur from Dalmatia, not the sugary red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and similar bottlings are what the book means; the syrup will make the cup cloying.
- Club sodaTwo bottles of the period likely means two small bottles, on the order of 6 to 10 oz each, so roughly one and a half to two and a half cups in total rather than a full liter of modern soda.
- Dissolve the sugar firstTwo large tablespoons of granulated sugar will sit on the bottom of a bowl of cold wine. Stir it into the spirits and wine thoroughly before the soda goes in, or use an equivalent volume of simple syrup.
- The iceOne large piece, not cubes, as the recipe specifies. A single block or a large mold chills with far less dilution over the life of the bowl.
- Fruits in seasonSliced orange, strawberries, peach or melon, added at the end so they are not bruised by stirring. Cucumber peel was the other common Victorian addition to a claret cup.
- YieldRoughly 48 to 52 oz of liquid before ice, giving eight to ten servings in the small stemmed glasses of the period, or six generous modern ones.
The "cup" was the Victorian and Edwardian answer to hot weather: a base wine lengthened with soda water, sweetened, dosed with a little liqueur and set on the sideboard over a block of ice for guests to help themselves. Claret cup and its cousins — Moortselle cup, cider cup, Badminton cup — appear in English household manuals of the era, and the form crossed into American hotel bars, which is where a book like this one, drawing on hotel and restaurant practice, would have picked up the bar measure "pony glass." "Claret" itself is the long-standing English term for the red wines of Bordeaux, a trade usage generally traced to the medieval clairet, a paler red. The closing note simply records that some people were averse to lemon juice.