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Punch, Anisette
Prepare a lemon water ice. Pour two tablespoons anisette into the lemon ice in the freezer, mix well with the spatula and serve in six sherbet glasses.
A frozen punch of the sort served between courses rather than at the end of a meal. The whole thing hinges on the anisette going in at the last moment, when the ice is already frozen.
- "The freezer" is the churn, not the applianceIn 1910 the freezer meant a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer — a metal can set in a bucket of ice and rock salt. The instruction is to stir the liqueur into the finished ice inside that can. A modern equivalent is folding it into sorbet just off the machine, or into firm sorbet worked briefly in a chilled bowl.
- Lemon water iceA water ice is sugar syrup, lemon juice and water, no dairy and no egg — what we now call sorbet. A workable proportion is about 2 cups water to 1 cup sugar with the juice of four to six lemons; the recipe assumes a lemon water ice prepared beforehand.
- Add the liqueur last, and only this muchAlcohol depresses the freezing point. Two tablespoons for a batch serving six is deliberately restrained; much more and the punch is likely to slump into slush in the glass. Churning the anisette in from the start would slow freezing and coarsen the texture.
- SpatulaA wooden or metal paddle used to work the ice off the sides of the can. Any stiff spatula does the job; the point is to fold rather than beat, so the ice does not warm and lose its texture.
- AnisetteA sweetened anise liqueur, lower in alcohol and sweeter than pastis or ouzo. If you substitute one of those the punch will read as harsher and drier, and the sugar in the ice will not be balanced against it.
- Yield and servingSix sherbet glasses — small stemmed glasses, commonly 4 to 6 ounces, chilled beforehand. Serve immediately; there is no holding this in the glass. Return any surplus to the freezer and rework it with a fork before a second serving.
Frozen punches like this belong to the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a spirit-laced water ice was set down between the heavy courses — the punch romaine of Escoffier's repertoire and of the grand hotel menus, meant to refresh the palate before the roast rather than to close the meal. The name punch is commonly traced to the Hindi and Sanskrit word for five, after the five components of the drink, though the derivation is disputed and by this period the word had loosened to mean almost any mixed and flavoured drink, frozen or not. Anisette gave the cook an easy, keepable bottle for the purpose: aniseed cordials were long-established European digestives, and a spoonful reads as unmistakably continental.