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Malaga Punch
Prepare a lemon-water ice. Pour into freezer half gill Malaga wine, mix well with spatula, divide punch into six sherbet glasses and serve.
A frozen punch of the kind served between courses rather than as dessert. The instruction assumes you already have the book's lemon water ice at hand, and that you are working with a hand-crank freezer.
- Add the wine at the endThis is the hinge. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so wine stirred in at the start leaves you with slush that never sets. Freeze the ice to a firm, scrapable texture first, then work the Malaga in.
- Half a gillOn the American gill of 4 fl oz, half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, about a quarter cup (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so 2.5 oz). That is a restrained amount across six glasses, and adding much more risks the punch not holding its shape.
- "Freezer" hereThe word means the ice-cream freezer -- a metal can turning in a bucket of ice and rock salt -- not the appliance in your kitchen. A modern churn works identically; if you are freezing in a tray, stir every twenty minutes and beat well before adding the wine.
- The lemon water iceA water ice is sugar syrup, water and lemon juice with no dairy or egg. If you are building it from scratch, roughly a quart of water and two cups of sugar boiled to a syrup, cooled, with the juice of six lemons, is in the period range.
- Malaga wineA sweet fortified wine from Andalusia, still made but not a supermarket staple. A cream sherry, sweet Marsala or Pedro Ximenez gives the same raisiny weight; dry sherry does not.
- Spatula, not a spoonThe recipe specifies only "mix well with spatula." A stiff spatula and a few quick turns folds the wine through without much working of the ice.
- ServingSix small glasses, filled loosely and served immediately -- it softens fast. Return the packed punch to the freezer for half an hour to firm up if the wine has slackened it.
A frozen punch was a course, not a pudding. Through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, formal dinners were broken by a small glass of wine-spiked ice, usually served before the roast course -- Roman punch was the most famous version, and cooks rang the changes with whatever spirit or sweet wine was in the house, hence Malaga, Marsala, kirsch and rum punches sitting side by side in the same chapters. Malaga wine itself, sweet and dark from the vineyards around the Andalusian port, was a familiar grocery item in American and British kitchens of the period, and appears in cookery and invalid-cookery books as well as at table. The brevity of the entry is a fair guide to how these books worked: the water ice is given in full elsewhere, and the punch is simply a variation noted in three lines.