Punch à la Romaine / Roman Punch

Cocktails and mixed drinks
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I’ve been on a bit of an ongoing deep dive into Punch à la Romaine this Fall with @Splificator and @slkinsey. We’ve added a collection of recipes to Total Mixology, for those of you who are over there.

This drink isn’t so well-known these days, but it was extremely well known for 150 years, well into the 20th Century. It started as a fairly specific Franco-Italian punch, got very famous, and evolved from there. @Splificator wrote about it in his book Punch.

In a nutshell, the core idea is a mashup of Champagne Punch and Italian lemon ice: cold, textural, lemony, effervescent, festive. It was often employed as a mid-meal palate cleanser in places like Delmonico’s (and famously first class ocean liner dining rooms—Punch à la Romaine is an object of interest for Titanic obsessives).

These are, in my current opinion, the essentials of a true Punch à la Romaine:

  1. champagne: i.e., any sparkling wine that is méthode champenoise; this is a champagne drink, dammit; needn’t be anything particularly expensive, but you probably want brut (mainly to easily control sweetness balance) and, obviously nothing weird
  2. lemon oleo-saccharum: lemon juice provides some acidity (along with the wine), but the drink needs the lemon oils for flavor
  3. lemon ice or sorbet: there are gobs of simplified recipes around that skip this, but if you’re not converting your lemon sherbet into a frozen form with an ice cream maker, you’re sacrificing a level of chill and texture from the finished drink; the drink should be a bit slushy (yet airy and effervescent); you can choose to sacrifice this, but it is a sacrifice; store-bought lemon sorbet might work in a pinch (I haven’t tried yet), but mainstream brands probably won’t carry the Italian ice lemon oil punch the drink deserves
  4. egg white meringue: the punch base is supposed to have whipped egg whites—ideally an Italian Meringue—folded into it; a lot of simplified recipes omit the egg whites, or just shake them up like in a Sour, or just dollop a bit of foam on top, but these represent additional compromises on texture about which you should be clear-eyed; Italian Meringue is trivial to whip up if you have a stand mixer with a whisk attachment, and IMO, it makes a big difference

One tip @slkinsey figured out is to keep every element of the drink (including the glasses) as cold as possible, even returning the folded mixture of rum, sorbet and meringue to the freezer for a spell before service.

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Italian meringue, eh? I’ve made Italian meringues, the cookie-ish confections— boiling a sugar syrup to soft ball stage (as I recall), then pouring it in a steady stream into soft-peak whipped egg whites as your stand mixer continues whisking them. In effect, you’re cooking the egg whites— still perfectly soft and meringue-y, but stable in the way plain beaten sugared egg whites aren’t (and seemingly impervious to the vagaries of humidity when you baked them).

Is that what you mean in this case? As a person who gags just thinking about raw egg whites in cocktails, I say BRING ON THE COOKED MERINGUE! Then again, it’s still soft meringue, which I dislike even on a pie. Definitely looks great on a cocktail, though.

And now I’m thinking about a batch of chocolate Italian meringues…so simple, yet so impressive when piped into ladyfinger shapes. A bit of a trick to time the egg white beating to match up with the sugar boiling, of course, yet the 4 or 5 times I’ve done it, it’s always worked. (so far.)

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Yes, that’s it. Not really too tricky, and maybe more forgiving for punch purposes than for cookies—just turn off the stand mixer and wait for the syrup to come to temperature, then start it up again when you’re ready to drizzle the syrup in. The essential thing is to be using an appropriate thermometer because the syrup won’t reach the right temperature until enough of the water has boiled off.