Regent's Punch

Drinking Cups and Their Customs by Henry Porter and George Roberts (1869, p.47) — Drinking Cups 1869

1. Add citrus rinds and juice, sugar, and cinnamon to strong green tea; stand for half an hour and strain.
2. Add champagne, sherry, brandy, rum, curacao, noyau, and pineapple syrup; ice well.
3. Immediately before drinking, add soda water.

Ice: Iced

Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks by William Terrington (1869, p.217) — Terrington 1869

1. Combine the champagne, hock, sherry, pale brandy, rum, lemon juice, Curaçao, green tea, and seltzer water.
2. Sweeten to taste, add abundant ice, and serve.

Ice: Abundant ice

This is one of the grandest mixed wine-and-spirit bowls in Terrington and deserves preservation on that basis alone.

The tea backbone and sparkling wine pairing make it structurally closer to an iced festive bowl than to a simple spirit punch.

How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion by Jerry Thomas (1876, p.27) — Jerry Thomas 1876

1. Combine the wines, spirits, soda-water, raisins, citrus, rock candy, and green tea in a large bowl.
2. Refrigerate the punch thoroughly with all available cold.
3. Serve well chilled for a party.

Garnish: Citrus and raisins in the bowl

Ice: Large ice

Nose

Wine, citrus peel, and rich festive fruit dominate the aroma.

Palate

It is opulent and mixed-wine in structure, carrying both sparkling lift and dark fortified depth.

Finish

The finish is broad, vinous, and lingering.

Summary

A true grand-party punch whose complexity comes from abundance rather than from a single governing spirit.

Regent's Punch is useful because it represents the showpiece hospitality side of nineteenth-century punch culture. It sits far from the simpler sherbet-and-rum line and helps preserve the social scale on which some of these drinks were conceived.

Because the instruction line is OCR-damaged, the exact chilling method is not perfectly legible, but the serve clearly depends on intense refrigeration. Large-format punches like this are as much about temperature and presentation as formula.

Compared with Glasgow Punch, this is the opposite pole of the same broad tradition: lavish rather than spare, mixed-wine rather than sharply spirit-led. It shows how elastic the word 'punch' remained in the period.

Bartenders' Guide: How to Mix Drinks by Wehman Bros. (1912, p.55)

1. Mix the tea, lemon juice, capillaire, rum, brandy, arrack, curacoa, pineapple, and oranges well together in a punch bowl, add the wine and ice just before serving, and serve.

Ice: Ice