Roman Punch: The Frozen Rum and Champagne Ice From the Titanic Menu, and How to Make It

Halfway through a long dinner, after the heavy plates have gone back to the kitchen, there is a lull. The candles have burned down a little. Everyone is full and nobody wants to admit there is still a roast coming. For a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the best houses filled that lull with a small glass of something cold, pale and faintly boozy: Roman punch.

We fell for it the first time we read an old menu closely. The name makes you expect a bowl of red liquid with orange wheels floating in it, and a ladle. Wrong on every count.

Not a punch you ladle

The French name was punch à la romaine, and it was an ice. Lemon and orange juice, their grated zest, and sugar syrup were frozen until slushy, then lightened with meringue and finished with rum and champagne or white wine. It arrived in a stemmed glass or a little cup and was eaten with a spoon, half sorbet and half cocktail.

Its job was to reset the palate. A dinner of that era might run through soup, fish, several meat courses and then a roast, and the cold citrus ice in the middle gave everyone a breather before the second half. The rum warmed and the lemon woke up the tongue. The champagne kept it from feeling like dessert.

On the Titanic, April 14, 1912

The most famous appearance of Roman punch is on the first-class dinner menu from the Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912. Listed as Punch Romaine, it sits partway down a long run of courses, a little before the roast squab. Surviving copies of that menu are why so many people search for this drink in the first place, and why it turns up at memorial dinners and themed evenings now.

We like to picture the glasses going out to the tables, frosted and glittering, the whole ship humming along underneath. Then we stop picturing it, because we know how that night ended.

In The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton set The Age of Innocence among the old families of 1870s New York, a world where a hostess’s menu got read almost as closely as her guest list. Roman punch belongs to those dinners. So if your book club stopped on the phrase, picture a frozen citrus ice with rum in it, brought out midway through the meal and eaten with a spoon. Not a punch bowl.

The Roman Punch on our recipe page

The Roman Punch in our recipe database is a different animal, and it’s a good one. Cognac and Jamaican rum go into a highball with lemon juice, orange juice, maraschino liqueur and bitters. The glass gets filled with crushed ice and swizzled until frosty, then topped with more crushed ice, an orange slice and a cherry. It’s a long, cold, citrusy drink with a straw rather than a spoon.

The family resemblance is plain once you taste it. Lemon, orange, rum and a lot of ice are the bones of both. If you want an alcoholic Roman punch recipe for a party, that swizzle is the quick route: we use an ounce of Cognac, an ounce of Jamaican rum, three-quarters of an ounce each of lemon and orange juice, a quarter ounce of maraschino and two dashes of bitters. The frozen version takes an afternoon, though most of that is the freezer doing the work.

How we make the frozen version at home

This makes eight small servings, enough for a dinner party with a few seconds. There’s no single historical recipe to copy, since every cook seems to have had their own, so treat our amounts as a starting point.

Make the syrup. Warm 1 cup of sugar in 1½ cups of water until it dissolves. Take it off the heat, add the grated zest of 2 lemons and 1 orange, and let it steep for 20 minutes. Strain.
Add the juice. Stir in ½ cup of fresh lemon juice and ½ cup of fresh orange juice. Chill it well.
Freeze it. Churn it in an ice cream maker until it looks like soft slush. No machine? Pour it into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake it with a fork every 30 to 45 minutes for about three hours.
Make the meringue. Cook ½ cup of sugar with 3 tablespoons of water to 240°F. Meanwhile, whip 2 egg whites to soft peaks. Stream the hot syrup in with the mixer running and keep whipping until the bowl is cool and the meringue is glossy.
Fold and freeze again. Fold the meringue into the ice, then stir in 3 ounces of rum. Gold or aged rum tastes rounder here than white. Freeze for another hour.
Finish at the table. Scoop into chilled coupes or small wine glasses and pour a tablespoon or two of cold champagne over each one.

The rum and champagne go in late for a practical reason: alcohol lowers the freezing point, so a mixture with too much of it never sets. Added near the end, the rum keeps the ice soft and scoopable, and the champagne fizzes against the cold for the first few spoonfuls.

The meringue matters more than it looks. It turns a sharp granita into something soft and almost creamy, and it’s the detail that marks Roman punch apart from an ordinary lemon ice.

Cousins worth knowing

If the full recipe is more project than you want, a few drinks in our database get you close in minutes. The Scorpino blends lemon Italian ice with vodka, cream and Cointreau, a modern cousin from the same palate-cleanser family. The Lemon Tree goes tropical with white and coconut rum, lemon sherbet and coconut cream.

For the rum-and-champagne half on its own, the American Flyer shakes light rum with lime and sugar and tops it with champagne. The Regent’s Punch is the grand bowl version, brandy, dark Jamaican rum, arrack, green tea, citrus and brut champagne, the kind of thing that once sat on a sideboard at a ball. Our champagne cocktails list and the holiday party punch recipes have plenty more along those lines, and you can search your own shelf on Cocktail Builder.

These days we bring the frozen Roman punch out on New Year’s Eve, between the main course and the cheese, and for about fifteen minutes the table goes quiet except for spoons on glass.

Last modified on November 8, 2026