Home › Dainty Dishes › Orange Punch
Orange Punch
Take one and one-half pints of clear orange juice, add to it one-half pint of water, and dissolve in it three-fourths of a pound of fine sugar. After freezing, add in the usual manner the beaten white of an egg.
A frozen orange ice of the kind served as a mid-dinner course around 1900. The proportions are sound; the finishing step is not, and it is the reason this page carries a caution.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded in after freezing and is never heated at any point. Uncooked egg white can carry Salmonella, and a frozen dessert holds it at a temperature that preserves rather than kills bacteria. Freezing is not a kill step. Use a current recipe if you want a meringue-lightened ice.
- "Punch" here is not a drinkIn this period a punch served in the dessert or entremets position was generally a frozen ice, closer to a sorbet than to a drink. Such ices were usually eaten with a spoon from a small glass.
- The measuresOne and a half pints of orange juice is 3 cups, the half pint of water is 1 cup, and three-quarters of a pound of fine sugar is roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups. "Fine sugar" means a fine-grained sugar of about caster grade; here it is dissolved cold rather than cooked into a syrup.
- Clear juice"Clear" most likely means strained free of pulp and membrane rather than clarified. Pulp left in the mix affects the texture and clouds the colour.
- Why so much sugarSugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice soft enough to scoop. Here the sugar is roughly a quarter of the mixture by weight, which keeps the texture on the soft, slushy side.
- "In the usual manner"The phrase assumes the freezer of the period: a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, churned until stiff, with the white beaten in afterwards and the whole repacked to ripen. The original gives no timing.
- YieldRoughly a quart to a quart and a quarter of mixture before aeration; the recipe itself gives no number of servings.
Frozen punches belong to the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth century, where a small iced course was served among the later courses to refresh the palate. The best-known member of the family is Roman punch, flavoured with rum and citrus; this orange version is an unspirited relative. The beaten egg white lightens the frozen mixture and adds volume.