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Punch Prunelle
Prepare lemon ice, pour in freezer two tablespoons prunelle liquor, sharply mix with spatula, then divide punch in six sherbet glasses and serve.
A frozen punch in the old sense: a lemon water ice loosened with liqueur and served in glasses between courses or at the end of a meal. The original assumes you already have a lemon ice recipe elsewhere in the book, so the whole job is the finish.
- The hinge: add the liqueur lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so prunelle stirred in before churning makes for a softer ice that is slower to set. Freeze the lemon ice firm first, then work in the two tablespoons quickly and serve at once.
- "Freezer" means the churnThe freezer of this period is the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer — a metal can packed in ice and salt. A modern machine's bowl, or a metal loaf pan from the deep freeze, does the same duty.
- PrunelleA sweet French liqueur flavoured with sloes or blackthorn plums, sometimes with a bitter-almond note from the kernels. Bottlings still exist but are uncommon; sloe gin is the nearest thing widely sold, though it is drier and less perfumed.
- Lemon ice, not sorbet as sold nowThe period lemon water ice is essentially water, sugar, and lemon juice, with no dairy, though some versions of the day add egg white or gelatin. The proportions come from the book's own lemon ice recipe, which this page assumes you have.
- Spatula, sharplyThe instruction is to fold hard and fast, not to churn. Over-working after freezing melts the edges and the punch slumps in the glass; a few decisive strokes are enough.
- Yield and glassesSix sherbet glasses, so about a pint and a half of finished ice — a small portion each, which is the point of a course punch. Chill the glasses first; a warm bowl will collapse the ice before it reaches the table.
- Where it belongs in a mealServed mid-meal, before the roast, or as a light close to dinner. It is not a drink to be poured, despite the name.
"Punch" in older menu language covers two quite different things: the spirit-and-citrus bowl, and the frozen course punch — punch à la romaine and its relatives — that appeared mid-meal to reset the palate before the heavier courses. This is the second kind, stripped to its simplest form. The convention is generally traced to French service of the nineteenth century, and it became a fixture of long formal dinners in Britain and America, where a menu might list a Roman punch, a kirsch punch, or a prunelle punch by name alone, on the assumption that the cook knew the base ice and only needed telling which bottle to reach for. That assumption is exactly why the instruction here runs to a single sentence.