Tea Punch
One quart of good tea made in the proportion of four teaspoonfuls of Ceylon tea to one quart of boiling water, five tablespoonfuls of clear lemon juice, two tablespoonfuls of juice from tart oranges, two scant cupfuls of granulated sugar, one pint of Apollinaris water. Stir the lemon and orange juice together, put them in a punch bowl with the tea, Apollinaris and a large block of ice. If possible add a cupful of fresh raspberries, but if these are not at hand, use in their place an equal quantity of pineapple dice.
A non-alcoholic iced punch of the kind served at afternoon receptions. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need attention: the sugar and the water.
- Dissolve the sugar in the hot teaTwo scant cups of granulated sugar will not dissolve in a cold bowl. Stir it into the quart of tea while the tea is still hot, then chill the syrup thoroughly before assembling; otherwise you get gritty punch and a sweet sludge at the bottom.
- Apollinaris waterA naturally sparkling German mineral water, widely sold in bottles around 1900 and treated as the standard mixer. Any dry sparkling mineral water or club soda serves; add it at the last moment so the punch is still lively when poured.
- Ceylon teaWhat we would now call a black tea from Sri Lanka, brisk and fairly assertive. Four teaspoons to a quart works out at about a teaspoon per cup, so the brew is not unusually strong, though it needs to hold up once ice and mineral water dilute it. Steep three to five minutes and strain at once; longer and the tannin will turn the cold punch bitter.
- The sweetnessTwo cups of sugar to roughly three pints of liquid is markedly sweeter than current taste. Half that quantity holds up perfectly well against the lemon; add the rest only after tasting the finished bowl.
- A large block of iceIce was delivered in blocks and chipped down, and a single large piece melts far more slowly than cubes. Freeze water in a loaf pan or plastic container for the same effect. Add the fruit, but for the same reason, don't crush ice into this or it will be watery within twenty minutes.
- Citrus quantitiesFive tablespoons of lemon juice is roughly two lemons; two tablespoons of orange juice, half a small orange. "Tart oranges" may mean a sour variety such as Seville, or simply a less sweet eating orange; either way, a little extra lemon compensates if only sweet oranges are at hand.
- Raspberries or pineappleBoth are there for aroma and color rather than bulk. Add them shortly before serving; the raspberries collapse and cloud the punch if they sit, and canned pineapple in syrup will push the sugar higher still.
- YieldAbout three pints before the ice, which serves eight to ten in punch cups. Doubling is straightforward if the tea is brewed in batches rather than left standing on the leaves.
Tea punches belong to the era of the afternoon reception and the church social, when a large glass bowl of something cold and non-alcoholic was the expected centerpiece. The word "punch" by 1900 covered fruit-and-tea mixtures as readily as it did rum. The specific call for Apollinaris water places the recipe in a broad but recognizable period: bottled mineral water from the Apollinaris spring in the Ahr valley was a fashionable import in American and British households through the late nineteenth century, advertised heavily and named often enough in cookbooks of the period that it functioned as a brand-name shorthand for sparkling water. The insistence on Ceylon tea is likewise of its moment; Ceylon plantings expanded rapidly after coffee blight destroyed the island's earlier crop in the 1870s, and by the 1890s Ceylon and Indian teas were displacing Chinese ones in English-speaking markets. Raspberries "if possible," pineapple dice if not, is a quiet reminder that soft fruit was strictly seasonal.