Wednesday, May 19, 2010

dry punch

1 quart Brandy (4 oz Château de Plassons VSOP Cognac)
1 quart Green Tea (4 oz Green Tea, steeped 5 minutes)
Juice 8 Lemons (1 Lemon)
1 1/2 oz Curaçao (1 tsp Senior Curaçao of Curaçao)
1/2 pound Sugar (1 oz California Crystals)

Dissolve sugar with lemon and tea. Add ice and other ingredients and chill. Decorate and serve in punch cups. Recipe serves 10. (I scaled down the recipe 8 fold and prepared by shaking with ice and straining into punch cups.)
On Friday night as dinner was on the stove, I opened up Boothby's 1934 edition of World Drinks And How To Mix Them and spotted the Dry Punch. The name was peculiar as it was neither nonalcoholic nor lacking sweetness. Lemon and Curaçao aromas were on the nose. On the sip, sweet lemon and Cognac flavors swirled around with green tea notes on the swallow. For such a simple and relatively quick to prepare punch recipe, it was quite the delight to drink. A similar recipe for Dry Punch appears in Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bartender's Guide which attributed the recipe to "Santina the celebrated Spanish caterer."

1 comment:

litfirebird said...

This sounds fantastic for a summer party.