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Punch Francaise
Place in a small saucepan half a gill good rum, eight ounces granulated sugar, the granted rind of a sound orange and the grated rind of a very sound lemon, as well as the juice of two oranges, two lemons, and half a teaspoon vanilla essence.
Have in a small teapot a tablespoon green tea; pour over it a pint of thoroughly boiling water and allow to infuse for ten minutes. Strain the tea through a clean cloth into the preparation and thoroughly mix; set the pan on the fire and let come to a boil. Remove from the fire, strain the punch through a cloth into a small freeze and let thoroughly cool off. Carefully cover it, place the freezer in a wooden tub with plenty chopped ice mixed with rock salt and then freeze for twenty minutes. Carefully wipe off the salt water from the top of the cover, remove the cover, then divide the punch into six sherbet glasses and serve.
This is a frozen punch — a sorbet served in sherbet glasses, of the kind that appeared between courses at long dinners. The method is a hand-crank ice cream freezer, but the mixture behaves the same in any modern churn.
- The measurementsA US gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup), so half a gill of rum is 2 fl oz, or 4 tablespoons; under the older imperial gill of 5 fl oz it would be 2 1/2 fl oz, or 5 tablespoons. The amount is small either way. Eight ounces of granulated sugar is a weight, roughly 1 1/8 cups; a pint here is 2 cups of water.
- Do not infuse green tea for ten minutesTen minutes in fully boiling water draws out a great deal of tannin, and the bitterness is noticeable once the mixture is cold and sweet. About three minutes in water around 175F is the usual modern practice and gives a softer flavour.
- "A small freeze" / freezerThis means the metal can of a crank-type ice cream freezer, which sits in a wooden tub packed with chopped ice and rock salt — the salt drives the ice bath below freezing. A modern churn or the canister of a stand-mixer attachment does the same job; the salt-wiping instruction exists only so brine does not run into the can when the lid comes off.
- The boil costs you the rumThe boil costs you some of the rum -- Bringing the mixture to a boil after the tea goes in drives off part of the alcohol, though a brief boil leaves more behind than is often assumed. A low spirit content also helps, since too much alcohol will not freeze. If you want the rum to register, stir it in cold once the syrup has cooled.
- Grated rind, then strained twiceThe zest is there for oil, not texture. Both strainings through cloth are needed — do not skip the second one, or you will churn shreds of peel and tea leaf into the ice.
- Freezing timeTwenty minutes is right for a churn but the mixture must be thoroughly cold first, refrigerator-cold, or it will never set. Expect a soft, spoonable slush rather than a scoopable ice; the sugar and citrus acid keep it loose.
- Yield and servingSix small sherbet glasses. The mixture comes to something over three cups, so that is roughly a half-cup a glass: a between-courses portion, not a dessert.
The word punch is generally traced to the Hindi panch, five, for the five elements of the original drink — spirit, sugar, citrus, water and spice — carried back to England by East India Company traders in the seventeenth century. By the time this book was compiled, punch had been absorbed into formal French service and frozen: a chilled, barely alcoholic ice served midway through a long dinner to reset the palate, the family that includes punch à la romaine and the various sorbets that Escoffier groups with his ices. The green tea here is worth noting — tea-based punches were common in nineteenth-century recipe books, where the tannin supplied the astringency that a heavier hand with spirits would otherwise have given, and the whole thing depended on the household owning an ice-and-salt freezer.