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Siberian Punch
Prepare a quart and a half vanilla ice cream. Beat the whites of three eggs to a stiff froth in a basin. Boil a gill of water with two ounces sugar for five minutes and gradually add to the egg froth, briskly whisking while adding it; then add a pint of the vanilla ice cream to this preparation with two tablespoons rum; gently mix with a wooden spoon. Divide the punch into six sherbet glasses and serve.
N. B. To avoid double work, in preparing the punch and Neapolitan ice cream prepare, as above explained, three pints in place of the usual quart; the other pint will be served later on.
A frozen punch of the sort served between courses in Edwardian dining rooms, built on a meringue that never gets hot enough to be safe. The measurements and vocabulary are worth reading even though the dish is not worth making.
- Why this one failsThe egg whites are cooked only by the heat of the syrup poured into them, and that syrup is unlikely to do the job. A gill of water with two ounces of sugar is a very dilute solution; five minutes of boiling drives off water but will probably leave it well short of the roughly 240F used for a cooked Italian meringue, and even then a syrup that small poured into three whites cannot be relied on to bring them to a safe temperature. Treat the whites as raw.
- The Salmonella riskA raw-white foam is folded into ice cream, chilled and served immediately, with no acid and no heat at any point. Two tablespoons of rum across six glasses is nowhere near enough alcohol to matter. If you want a frozen punch, use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a properly cooked Italian meringue.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces in American usage. It is one of the commonest archaic liquid measures in books of this period.
- Two ounces sugarA weight, not a volume: about a quarter cup of granulated sugar.
- Sherbet glassesSmall stemmed glasses, not dessert bowls. A pint of ice cream with the foam and syrup folded in, divided six ways, fills each one modestly.
- The N.B.The note assumes you are working through the book's Neapolitan ice cream entry at the same time and tells you to churn three pints of vanilla instead of a quart so one pint can be diverted here. It is a kitchen-economy instruction to a cook running a whole menu, not part of this recipe.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the structure of a formal late-nineteenth-century dinner rather than home cooking. In that structure a punch was not a bowl of party drink but a course: a small, half-frozen, spirit-laced ice served to clear the palate before the roast and the game. Punch romaine is the best-known survivor of the type, and menus of the period are full of variants named for places, cold ones in particular, the geography doing the work of describing something icy. The method here, hot syrup whisked into beaten whites and folded through ice cream, is the professional shortcut version: it produces the soft, foamy texture of a churned punch, and the recipe closes with a note about churning one extra pint of vanilla so as to avoid double work between two dishes.