Home › Dainty Dishes › Frozen Roman Punch
Frozen Roman Punch
Make Roman punch by grating the yellow rinds of two lemons and one orange on a pound of lump sugar, to which add the fruit juice and let stand until the sugar is dissolved, then straining and adding half a bottle of champagne and beaten whites of four eggs, when it is ready for freezing.
The method is sound period confectionery, but the finished punch contains raw egg white that is frozen rather than cooked, and it is served as-is. That is the one thing that rules it out.
- Why the cautionFour raw egg whites go into the mixture and never reach any temperature that would kill Salmonella; freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them. The alcohol in half a bottle of champagne is nowhere near enough to sterilise anything. Use a current recipe if you want frozen Roman punch.
- Lump sugarA pound of loaf or lump sugar is roughly two cups granulated. Here the rind is grated onto the sugar rather than the sugar being rubbed against the fruit.
- Oleo-saccharumGrating the rinds onto sugar and letting the mixture stand is the classic punch-maker's step, drawing the citrus oil out into a fragrant syrup. It is the whole flavour of the drink, and the recipe times it only by the sugar dissolving.
- Half a bottle of champagneA standard bottle around 1900 was close to the modern 750 ml, so this means about 375 ml — a half-bottle.
- "Ready for freezing"The book assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, churned until slushy. Roman punch was never meant to set hard; the sugar and alcohol keep it at a spoonable, granular consistency.
- Where it belonged in the mealThe recipe gives no yield; it was served in small glasses as a course, not as a dessert portion.
Roman punch was a fixture of formal American and European dinners through the second half of the nineteenth century, served midway through a long menu as a sorbet course to clear the palate before the roast. The name is generally traced to eighteenth-century punch recipes built on citrus and rum, later reworked with champagne and lightened with meringue; the egg whites are what gave it the pale, foamy body that distinguished it from a plain water ice. It appears in the "Dainty Dishes" chapter here because by 1900 it had become a marker of a properly appointed table — the sort of thing a hostess with an ice freezer and a set of small punch glasses would be expected to manage. Its most quoted appearance is at White House dinners of the Hayes era, where the household was officially dry and the question of whether the punch actually contained alcohol remains the disputed heart of the anecdote.