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Cup Champagne
Mix in punch bowl a quart champagne, two pony glasses each curacao (white) and maraschino, half pony best brandy and one or two bottles Club soda. Stir slowly with ladle, add a large piece of ice, also fruits in season, and serve in fancy wine glasses.
A standard champagne cup of the period, built in a bowl rather than shaken. The only tricky part is the archaic glassware used as measures.
- Pony glassA pony is 1 fluid ounce (2 tablespoons). So this is 2 oz white curaçao, 2 oz maraschino and about 1/2 oz brandy to a quart of champagne.
- "One or two bottles Club soda"Period club soda was generally sold in small split bottles, considerably smaller than the litre bottle on a modern shelf. Figure somewhere in the region of 6 to 16 oz total, added last and to taste; too much will thin and flatten the wine.
- White curaçaoWhite curacao -- curacao was sold both clear and orange-tinted; the white version is the same bitter-orange liqueur without colouring. Triple sec or a dry orange curacao is the closest current equivalent.
- MaraschinoThis means the dry, faintly bitter Luxardo-style cherry liqueur, not the sweet syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Two ounces of the syrup would make the bowl cloying.
- The large piece of iceA single block chills without diluting; cubes melt fast and water down the wine within minutes. Freeze water in a loaf pan or plastic container, or chill every ingredient hard and use one large chunk only.
- Order of workThe recipe simply says to mix in the bowl and stir slowly with a ladle. Combining the liqueurs and brandy before adding the well-chilled champagne is a sensible refinement rather than anything the text specifies. Stir slowly, as directed; vigorous stirring drives off the bubbles the drink depends on.
- Fruits in seasonSliced strawberries, peach, orange wheels or grapes. Add them at the last moment; fruit left to sit in the bowl goes soft and clouds the cup.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts once the soda is in, or roughly 10 to 12 small wine glasses. It does not keep, so mix it as the guests arrive.
A "cup" in this sense is a category, not a brand: a chilled bowl of wine or cider lengthened with soda water, sharpened with a little liqueur and garnished with fruit, drunk at English and American summer parties from the early nineteenth century onward. Champagne cup, claret cup and cider cup all appear side by side in Victorian and Edwardian household manuals, and the point of them was to stretch expensive wine across a crowd while keeping it cold and light. The pony-glass measures and the instruction to buy soda by the bottle place this squarely in the era before home carbonation, when siphons and small bottled club soda were bar staples.