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Punch Chartreuse
Prepare a lemon-water ice, pour in while in freezer two tablespoons yellow chartreuse, mix well with spatula and serve in six sherbet glasses.
A punch course in miniature: lemon ice spiked with liqueur at the last moment. The whole thing hinges on when the Chartreuse goes in and how much.
- "Freezer" means the churnIn period usage the freezer is the hand-cranked ice-cream can packed in ice and rock salt, not the freezer compartment. An ice-cream machine does the same job; failing that, still-freeze the lemon ice in a shallow pan, breaking up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes.
- Add the liqueur lateAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so Chartreuse stirred in at the start will leave you with slush that never sets. The instruction to pour it in while the ice is already frozen and mix with a spatula is the point of the recipe; do it in the last minute or two and return the ice to the freezer to firm up.
- Lemon water iceNo formula is given; lemon water ice was a standard preparation assumed to be known. A workable ratio is 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup strained lemon juice and a little zest, boiled to a syrup and cooled before churning. The sugar level matters: too little and the ice freezes rock hard.
- Yellow versus greenYellow Chartreuse is the milder, sweeter, honey-toned version at 43% alcohol; green is 55% and far more aggressively herbal. Green would dominate the lemon.
- Two tablespoons is one ounceThat is a whole fluid ounce across six glasses, so about a teaspoon per serving. It reads as restraint but it suits a course meant to refresh rather than intoxicate.
- Sherbet glassesPeriod sherbet or champagne-saucer glasses hold about 4 ounces, so six of them take up to a pint and a half of ice. Chill the glasses first; a stemmed glass keeps a warm hand off the ice.
- ServingServe immediately, soft rather than solid, as a mid-meal course. Left in a deep freeze overnight it will set hard and need 10 to 15 minutes of tempering.
The punch course, sometimes called Roman punch, was a fixture of long formal dinners from the mid-nineteenth century onward: a small glass of half-frozen, lightly spirituous ice served in the middle of the meal to clear the palate and, it was said, revive the appetite for the courses still to come. Named punches of this kind were built by swapping the spirit -- rum, kirsch, maraschino, champagne -- and here it is Chartreuse, the herbal liqueur made by Carthusian monks near Grenoble, whose yellow version is the gentler and sweeter of the two. The recipe's brevity may be telling, though the inference is only a guess: perhaps a professional cook was assumed to know a lemon water ice by heart, so that the only instructions worth writing down were the liqueur, the moment it goes in, and the number of glasses.