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Ginger Ale Bowle
Squeeze upon a cupful of granulated sugar the juice of six large lemons or eight small ones, and put on the ice for an hour. When ready to serve, put two cupfuls of crushed ice into a punch bowl, pour in two bottles of ginger ale, which should have previously been well chilled, and thrust into the liquid a dozen long sprays of mint, bruising the stems well between the fingers beforehand. Serve immediately.
A three-ingredient temperance punch that depends entirely on temperature and timing. The original text has one clear gap worth knowing about before you start.
- The missing stepThe recipe never tells you to add the lemon-sugar mixture to the bowl, but that is plainly the intent. Pour the syrup over the crushed ice first, then add the ginger ale so the bubbles carry it up through the drink rather than needing to be stirred in.
- Why the sugar sits an hourUndissolved granulated sugar can stay gritty in a cold drink. The hour on ice most likely lets the sugar and juice become a syrup; stirring once or twice while it stands will help.
- Lemon quantitySix large lemons yield roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of juice, which against one cup of sugar gives a sharp, barely sweet base. Lemon size varies a good deal, so taste the syrup and adjust rather than counting fruit.
- Bottles of ginger alePeriod ginger ale bottles were far smaller than the 2-litre bottle a modern reader pictures; two of them amount to something on the order of 3 to 4 cups, added last.
- The ginger ale itselfTurn-of-the-century ginger ale was mostly the golden, Belfast-style drink: darker, sweeter, and much more sharply gingered than pale dry ginger ale. A modern craft or "extra ginger" bottling is closer to what the author had in mind than a supermarket mixer.
- Bruising the mintThe recipe specifies crushing the stems rather than the leaves. Bartenders commonly hold that shredded leaf tissue makes mint taste bitter and green, though that is rule of thumb more than demonstrated fact.
- Serve immediatelyCrushed ice melts fast and carbonation goes flat faster still. Assemble at the table and ladle at once. The recipe pours in both bottles at the start; if you prefer, hold the second in the refrigerator to freshen the bowl instead.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 to 2 quarts once the ice melts down, or a dozen or so small punch cups.
Bowle is German, the word for both the vessel and the fruit-steeped punch served from it, and it entered American cookbooks through the same channel as the Rhine wine and strawberry bowles that appear alongside it in period beverage chapters. This one is the teetotal version: the wine has been swapped for bottled ginger ale, which by the 1890s was cheap, widely available, and one of the few bottled carbonated drinks a household could buy by the case. That substitution is the whole point of its presence here. Late nineteenth-century American cookbooks needed punches that could be set on a table at a reception or a church social without comment, and lemon, sugar, ice and ginger ale did the job.