Home › The World's Kitchen › Coffee Punch
Coffee Punch
One quart lukewarm water, one gill very strongly made coffee, three sound lemons, three-quarters of a pound granulated sugar and the white of half an egg. Place all the above except the lemons in a copper basin, grate the rind of two lemons into the basin, squeeze in the juice of the three lemons. Sharply mix with the spatula for five minutes. Strain the preparation through a Chinese strainer into a small freezer, then proceed exactly the same as for vanilla ice cream. Fill six punch glasses with the punch and serve.
This is not a drink but a frozen punch — a lemon-and-coffee ice churned in an ice cream freezer and served in small glasses. Read "punch" here as the mid-meal ice course, not something poured from a bowl.
- The measurementsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. Three-quarters of a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 2/3 cups, or 340 g. The quart of lukewarm water plus that sugar gives roughly the syrup density of a sorbet base.
- "Very strongly made coffee"Half a cup is a small amount against a quart of water, so it needs to be genuinely concentrated — espresso strength or strong cold-brew concentrate. Ordinary drip coffee will vanish behind the lemon.
- Copper basinOnly a mixing vessel here, and a poor choice with this much citrus. Use stainless steel or glass; the acid will pick up metallic flavour from bare copper.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job — its purpose is to catch the grated zest and pulp so the finished ice is smooth.
- Grate before you squeezeZest the two lemons while the fruit is whole and firm. Once halved and juiced they are almost impossible to grate cleanly, and the oil in the rind carries most of the lemon aroma.
- The egg whiteHalf a white, beaten in for five minutes, is there for body and a lighter texture rather than richness. It is never cooked, so use a pasteurized white if that matters to you; whipped aquafaba behaves similarly.
- "A small freezer"A hand-crank ice cream freezer packed with ice and salt. A modern ice cream machine works directly; failing that, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- It will freeze hardThere is no dairy and no alcohol, so this sets much firmer than ice cream. Serve it straight from the churn, or let it soften a few minutes and break it up before spooning into glasses.
- YieldThe recipe says six punch glasses, but a quart of water plus coffee, juice and sugar makes well over that in a small glass of the period, so expect leftovers or more servings than six.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its instructions carry the assumptions of a professional kitchen — copper basins, chinois, spatulas, a freezer standing ready. A frozen punch of this kind belonged to a specific place in the long formal dinner: served between the heavier courses, generally somewhere around the roast, to clear the palate. The most famous version was Roman punch, spiked with rum or champagne; coffee punch is its unspirited cousin, getting its bite from lemon and its depth from a small measure of very strong coffee. The course faded along with the long formal menu, and the surviving descendant is the restaurant palate-cleansing sorbet, usually a single spoonful rather than a full glass.