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Punch Stanley
Prepare a lemon water ice and keep in the freezer till required. Boil one ounce best ground coffee with two gills water and half a vanilla stick, split in two, for ten minutes. Remove and let cool off, then strain through a cheesecloth into the lemon ice freezer, adding a tablespoon kirsch and a tablespoon maraschino. Thoroughly mix with the spatula and serve in six sherbet glasses. (Keep the vanilla in sugar for further use.)
A frozen punch meant as a mid-dinner palate course rather than a dessert. Almost everything hinges on understanding that the "freezer" here is a hand-cranked ice cream churn, not the appliance in your kitchen.
- GillsIn American measure a gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water. Boiling an ounce of coffee in a cup of water for ten minutes yields a small quantity of strong, over-extracted coffee essence, which appears to be the intent: it has to flavour the whole batch of ice without watering it down. The recipe does not say how much lemon ice that is.
- Vanilla stickA vanilla bean, split. Half a bean for a cup of liquid is generous by modern standards. The closing instruction to bury the spent pod in a jar of sugar is a common thrift of the period.
- The freezer"The lemon ice freezer" means the churn canister packed in ice and salt. The coffee and liqueurs are stirred in with a spatula, into ice that is already frozen but still soft, and served at once.
- The lemon water iceNot given on this page. Any sugar-and-lemon sorbet base works: roughly 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup lemon juice, churned. Make enough to fill six small glasses; the recipe gives no quantity.
- Alcohol and textureThe two tablespoons of liqueur, together with the sugar in the base, help keep the mixture soft rather than solid; it is meant to be spoonable slush. If you make it in advance in a domestic freezer, expect to break it up with a fork before serving.
- Kirsch and maraschinoKirsch is a dry brandy distilled from whole cherries, stones included; maraschino is a sweet liqueur made from Marasca cherries, associated with Dalmatia (Luxardo or similar), not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Substituting the jar syrup ruins the balance.
- Strain properlyCheesecloth catches the grounds, but pour slowly and do not squeeze the cloth or you will push fine sediment into the ice and leave it gritty.
- Yield and serviceSix sherbet glasses, a few spoonfuls each. Serve immediately; it slumps within minutes at room temperature.
Frozen punches like this one belong to the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a small iced spirit-laced sorbet was served partway through the meal — in classic menu order after the entrées and before the roast or game course — to reset the palate. The best-known survivor of the family is punch à la romaine; hotel and restaurant kitchens turned out many variants and named them after patrons, performers and public figures, which may be where "Stanley" comes from, though the specific honouree is not recorded. The construction is typical of the genre: a plain water ice as the neutral base, an intense infusion for flavour, and a spoonful each of two liqueurs added at the last moment to help keep the mixture loose and cold rather than solid. The final note about storing the used vanilla pod in sugar reflects the cost of vanilla in this period.