This month, we are going simple with a punch. I think my favorite part of this recipe is the title: To Make a Beautiful Flavoured Punch. I love it so much.
Actually, my favorite might be the background. Taken from The House Servant’s Directory, the book (and therefore recipe) was written by Robert Roberts, a butler in a senator’s household, and was one of the first books written by an African American and published by a commercial publisher.
A Beautiful Flavoured Punch
The House Servant’s Directory by Robert Roberts
The very first instruction seems simple at first glance – take one dessert-spoonful of acid salt of lemon. . . of course, then you have to know what a dessert-spoonful is…and what acid salt of lemon is. Thankfully, dessert-spoonful was easy enough to look up. Two teaspoons! Acid salt of lemon was another thing. The closest thing I could find on google was citric acid, and I finally confirmed that through a chemical primer published in 1884. So citric acid it was.
Then add half a pound of good white sugar…and here I pause again because did you know that sugar was a thing? There’s a good reason he says good white sugar. And not just because of loaf sugar (covered a couple episodes ago). My favorite Wagon Wheel Kitchens goes into detail about the history of sugar. According to the author, you could get sugar white, brown, clarified, crushed, powdered, loaf…and white sugar as we know it was not readily available until the 1870s. Even if you didn’t purchase brown sugar, which wasn’t the brown sugar we now know, but “a raw, lumpy sticky product” (pg 21), your typical “white sugar” wouldn’t be pure white either. It would simply have less brown in it because it was so expensive to separate the molasses from the sugar. I’d love to do more research into it, but based on google searches, I’m guessing most of Jacqueline’s information came from her recommended culinary reading books, which I don’t have on hand. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it?
But moving on, add sugar, boiling water, Jamaican rum, brandy, and either lemon peel or essence of lemon “if agreeable”. I’m not sure why he specified if agreeable, but I opted to use lemon essential oil, since I knew it was edible, and I wanted to see how it turned out. And also I didn’t want to buy lemons.
Then pour it from one pitcher to another “twice or thrice” to mix. I’d like you to know…I don’t have pitchers big enough for that. So I cut the recipe in half…and poured from pitcher to pitcher. And then served it to Daniel (yes, still warm).
It. Was. Delicious. Like, amazing. Daniel has told me multiple times I can make it again. He brought it to the neighbor and the neighbor helped him finish the entire decanter. Yup. For a recipe from almost 200 years ago, it’s still one of the best alcoholic punch recipes I’ve ever tried.
Oh, and don’t forget to head over to Instagram to see the highlights! And all my gratitude to my sister, Tianna, who did all the recording and reel-making for me!
Forest Idylls 