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Kummel Punch
Prepare a lemon-water ice. Pour in two tablespoons kummel in the freezer, mix well with a wooden spoon and serve the punch in six sherbet glasses.
A frozen punch of the kind served between courses at long formal dinners rather than as dessert. The whole recipe rests on an unwritten base — a lemon water ice — and on one piece of chemistry the original assumes you know.
- What "the freezer" meansIn cookbooks of this period the freezer is the hand-cranked ice-cream churn: a metal canister set in a bucket of ice and rock salt, turned by hand. The instruction to stir with a wooden spoon means opening the canister once the ice has set and working the liqueur through the frozen mass. In a modern churn, add the kümmel in the last minute of churning.
- The lemon water iceNo proportions are given; the base was evidently assumed to be familiar. A lemon water ice of the type runs roughly 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar and 3/4 cup lemon juice with the zest, boiled to a syrup, cooled and strained before freezing. Anything much sweeter will not freeze firm.
- KümmelA clear, sweetened grain spirit flavoured with caraway, cumin and fennel, associated with the Netherlands and Germany. It is still made, though it has drifted to the back shelf. Caraway is the dominant note, so this is a savoury-leaning punch, not a fruit sorbet.
- Add the alcohol last, and no more than statedAlcohol depresses the freezing point. Two tablespoons across six servings is deliberately restrained; doubling it will leave you with slush that never sets. This is the hinge of the recipe.
- TextureA water ice is meant to be granular and firm, not creamy. If made in a modern machine it will come out smoother than intended; a still-frozen version scraped with a fork every 30 minutes gives something closer to the original.
- Yield and serviceSix sherbet glasses; period sherbet glasses were small, so each serving was only a few spoonfuls. Served chilled and eaten immediately, at the mid-point of a formal dinner rather than as dessert.
Frozen punches occupy a specific slot in the elaborate dinner service of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a small, sharp, spirit-laced ice served partway through the meal, variously called a punch, a sorbet or by the French romaine, and intended to cut the richness of what had come before and revive appetite for what followed. The alcohol was as much the point as the cold. K— sorry — Kümmel gives this version its character — a caraway liqueur long associated with the Low Countries and northern Germany, generally traced to Dutch distilling in the sixteenth century and later taken up in Russia and the Baltic, where it acquired its reputation as a digestive. Its appearance in a book organised around "The World's Kitchen" is of a piece with the title: a lemon water ice with two spoonfuls of kümmel stirred in was enough to make the dish continental.