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Roman Punch
Prepare a lemon-water ice, pour in three tablespoons good Jamaica rum, thoroughly mix with the spatula, fill up six sherbet glasses, make a small hollow in the centre, fill up with a little rum and serve.
A frozen intermezzo rather than a dessert, and it assumes you already have the lemon-water ice from elsewhere in the book. A few points make the difference between a punch and a puddle.
- The missing baseNo lemon-water ice recipe is given here; the book handles water ices separately. One workable proportion is about 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar and 3/4 cup strained lemon juice, churned or still-frozen until slushy, though that makes well over six small glasses. Sweeten a little more than seems right; freezing mutes sugar and acid alike.
- Add the rum at the end, not the startThis is the hinge. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so rum stirred into the base before churning gives a mixture that never sets. Freeze the ice firm first, then fold in the three tablespoons and serve immediately.
- Jamaica rumAt the time this meant a dark, pungent pot-still rum, not a light filtered white rum. Use a full-flavoured dark Jamaican rum if you want the taste the recipe intends; a light rum disappears entirely against the lemon.
- SpatulaA wooden or metal paddle for working ice in the can of a hand-cranked freezer. A sturdy silicone spatula or a stiff spoon does the same job in a loaf pan.
- Sherbet glassesSmall stemmed glasses of roughly 4 fl oz, filled part way. This is a small few-spoonful serving; it is not meant to be a bowl of sorbet.
- TextureServe it just short of firm, spoonable and granular rather than scoopable like ice cream. Chill the glasses first, since the rum poured into the hollow will start melting the surface at once.
- When to serve itTraditionally between the roast and the game or before the main roast, as a palate cleanser midway through a long dinner. It works equally well now as a short, sharp course between a rich starter and the main dish.
Roman punch was a fixture of formal nineteenth-century menus on both sides of the Atlantic: a rum- or arrack-spiked lemon ice served mid-meal to cut the richness of what had gone before, listed on French-influenced bills of fare as punch à la romaine. The connection to Rome is decorative rather than documented — the dish belongs to the era of the grand service dinner and the hand-cranked ice freezer, not to antiquity. Grander versions folded Italian meringue or whipped egg white into the ice to give a foamy body, and it was famous enough to appear at American state dinners and, by tradition, aboard the first-class dining rooms of the great liners. The version here is stripped to essentials, which is characteristic of The International Cook Book: Filippini wrote for a working kitchen and expected the cook to know the lemon-water ice already.