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Lemon Punch
Lemon punch is made the same way, except that it requires a full pound of sugar.
This is a one-line variation, not a standalone recipe: it points back to the punch immediately preceding it in the book and changes only the sugar. Anything you do with it depends on recovering that base formula.
- The missing half"Made the same way" refers to the recipe printed immediately above it, which is not reproduced here. Without that page you have no liquid quantities, no steeping method and no ice instruction. Read the two together or the line is unusable.
- Why more sugarThe only change the line makes is to raise the sugar to a full pound, which is consistent with lemons being sharper and less sweet than most other punch fruit; the base quantity is unknown. A pound is about 2 1/4 cups granulated.
- Scale is unstatedA pound of sugar implies a punch bowl rather than a pitcher, but the original gives no yield and no liquid quantity, so any serving figure is inference, not something from the book.
- Dissolve the sugar firstA pound of dry sugar dissolves slowly and grudgingly in cold juice. Punch makers of the period commonly boiled sugar and water into a syrup and cooled it, or rubbed sugar lumps on the lemon peel to draw the oil before dissolving. Either step is assumed rather than stated.
- Lemons then and nowReckon on about 3 tablespoons of juice per modern lemon, and adjust the sugar downward if the finished punch tastes syrupy.
- Punch is not necessarily alcoholicThe line says nothing about spirits either way. The base recipe will tell you whether wine or rum is involved.
Punch reached English kitchens from India in the seventeenth century, and the name is generally traced to a Hindi or Sanskrit word for five, after the five classical components: spirit, sugar, lemon or lime, water and spice. In the American household manuals in which recipes like this one were compiled, the temperance movement and the fashion for afternoon receptions had pulled punch in two directions at once — the bowl remained the centrepiece of a large gathering, but the contents were as often fruit juice, sugar and ice as anything stronger. The terse cross-reference is itself characteristic of the genre: compilers assumed a reader working straight down the page, and printed variations as a single line rather than repeating a formula.