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Punch, Yvette
Prepare a quart of lemon water ice. While the punch is in the freezer pour in two tablespoons creme Yvette. If creme Yvette is not at hand any other kind of liquor can be substituted. Freeze and serve.
A frozen punch of the sort served midway through a long dinner: essentially lemon sorbet spiked with a violet liqueur. The whole method rests on when the alcohol goes in.
- Add the liquor lateAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so a spirit stirred in at the start leaves you with slush. Two tablespoons in a quart is a small enough dose to be harmless, but follow the original and pour it in once the ice has already set up in the machine, then churn only long enough to distribute it.
- "The freezer" is a churnIn Filippini's day this means a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt, not a compartment of the refrigerator. A modern ice-cream maker does the same job; without one, still-freeze the lemon ice in a shallow pan, breaking up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes, and fold the liqueur in at the last stir.
- Lemon water iceA water ice is sugar syrup, lemon juice and water, with no dairy and usually no egg. A workable ratio for a quart is roughly 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar and 1 cup strained lemon juice, chilled before churning. The entry assumes the reader already knows how to make a lemon water ice.
- Crème YvetteA violet-and-berry liqueur, sweet and floral, that went out of production in the twentieth century and was revived in 2009. Crème de violette is the closest substitute; the book's own permission to use "any other kind of liquor" points to kirsch, maraschino or rum, all standard for punches of this type.
- Sweetness balanceCrème Yvette and its stand-ins are heavily sweetened liqueurs. If you use one, hold back a little of the sugar in the base or the finished ice will be cloying and slow to firm.
- Yield and serviceA quart serves six to eight as a mid-dinner punch, spooned into small chilled glasses. In formal menus of the period a punch of this kind was typically served partway through the meal rather than as a dessert, which is why the portions are small.
Frozen punches like this one belong to the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a spirited water ice was served partway through the menu to break the run of rich courses — the French called it the sorbet course, and American hotel cooks often gave the individual versions the name of a liqueur, a place, or a patron. Alessandro Filippini, who had cooked at Delmonico's in New York, filled his books with exactly this kind of shorthand entry: a line or two written for a professional who already knows how to make a lemon water ice and needs only to be told what to flavour it with. Crème Yvette itself was an American-made violet liqueur, deep purple and perfumed, and is often said to have been named for the French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. It disappeared from the market for decades, which is why the recipe's casual offer of a substitute has turned out to be the most useful line in it.