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Punch Au Curacao
Prepare a lemon ice, and when ready add two and a half tablespoons good curacao; mix well for one minute and serve in six sherbet glasses.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already have a lemon ice on hand and know what a dinner-table punch is for. The whole thing turns on temperature and on how little liqueur you add.
- The lemon iceA plain water ice of sugar, water and lemon juice, churned or still-frozen. It should be firm but not set hard as a block when the curaçao goes in.
- Add the liquor at the end, and only thenAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so a large addition will keep the mixture from holding; stirring a small quantity in after freezing, as directed, keeps the texture intact.
- One minute means one minuteLong working softens and aerates the ice into slush. Fold just until the curaçao is evenly distributed, then serve or return briefly to the freezer.
- CuraçaoAn orange liqueur made from dried bitter-orange peel. Any decent triple sec or a genuine curaçao works; the blue bottlings will tint the ice, which the original did not intend.
- Yield and glasswareThe recipe gives six sherbet glasses but no quantity of ice. Chill the glasses first.
- Where it belongs in a mealFrozen punches of this kind were generally served in small quantity between courses rather than as a dessert, and eaten in a few spoonfuls while still half-frozen.
Punches of this kind — frozen, spiked, and served mid-meal — were a fixture of formal American and European dining from the later nineteenth century, the best known being punch à la romaine, which appears in Escoffier and which famously appeared on the Titanic's first-class menu. The purpose was practical as much as ceremonial: a cold, acid, lightly alcoholic ice between heavy courses was held to settle the palate and the stomach. Curaçao takes its name from the Caribbean island, where bitter oranges descended from Spanish plantings yielded peel too harsh to eat but excellent for flavoring spirits; by 1900 the term covered a broad class of orange liqueurs made all over Europe.