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Punch, Violette
Prepare a lemon ice, but adding to the preparation before freezing two tablespoons essence of violette.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make a lemon ice and that violet essence sits in your cupboard. Neither is true now, so both need filling in.
- What the base isA lemon ice (water ice, not a cream) is roughly 4 cups water, 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar and the juice of 4 to 6 lemons, with a little zest steeped in the syrup and strained out. Dissolve the sugar in the water warm, cool completely, then add the juice.
- Essence of violetteA concentrated flavouring extract sold by grocers and confectioners. Such extracts were often built on orris root, and later on synthetic ionones, rather than on actual flowers. Modern equivalents vary wildly in strength: a violet extract or a violet syrup used at two tablespoons will read very differently. Add a teaspoon, taste, and build up.
- Do not use violet liqueur one-for-oneCrème de violette is the easiest violet flavour to buy, but it is sweet and about 16-20% alcohol. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so a large pour gives you slush that never sets. Two tablespoons in a quart is tolerable; much more is not.
- Add flavour cold, before churningThe instruction to add before freezing matters. Violet aroma is fragile and volatile; stirring it into a warm syrup drives most of it off. Chill the base thoroughly first, then flavour, then churn.
- Freezing without an ice-cream freezerAn ice-cream machine gives the best texture. Otherwise freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours, which produces a granita-like punch entirely in keeping with the period.
- ColourThe flavouring alone will not make it violet. Tinting ices was common practice in confectionery of the period; a drop or two of colouring, or a spoonful of blackcurrant juice, gets you there without changing the taste much.
- Yield and serviceNearer 1 1/2 quarts from the quantities above, serving eight to ten in small stemmed glasses. Serve it soft rather than hard-frozen, as a palate-clearing course partway through the meal rather than as dessert.
A frozen "punch" of this kind is not a drink and not quite a dessert; it belongs to the long formal menu, where a small glass of tart ice was served partway through the meal to reset the palate before the heavier roasts. Roman punch, made with lemon ice and rum, was the standard version on American hotel and restaurant menus through the second half of the nineteenth century, and violette is simply one of a family of variations that swapped in a fashionable flavour. Violet was very fashionable indeed around 1900: violet pastilles, violet perfume, crystallised violets from Toulouse and Parma violet sweets were all in wide commercial production, and confectioners' extracts made the scent available to any kitchen with a bottle. The recipe's brevity is itself a period signal: such entries were written for cooks who knew the base preparations by heart and needed only the distinguishing detail.