This recipe is the Fresh Mint Punch ("Spring Branch Cooler") from the Southern Appalachian Mountain Cookbook by Ferne Shelton, which is more like a pamphlet than a cook book. It is copyrighted from 1964, and was passed down to me from someone in my family.
The first step is preparing the mint. I grow pineapple mint in my front yard (which smells and tastes like pineapple), so I used that, but any variety of mint will likely do. You will need a cup of mint leaves and stalks, so this for me was approximately a colander full of stalks before I squashed it into the measuring cup.
An additional step I took since this mint was coming from my yard was to soak and rinse the leaves in some water to clean them from dirt and bugs.
Then I chopped and mashed the mint and mixed it with the sugar and lemon juice. This has to stand for a couple of hours, during which time the mint will infuse the lemon juice with mintyness.
The next step is to make a syrup using more mint and more lemons and boiling it, which was very easy, and made my house smell like it was just cleaned.
Once the syrup was thick enough, I let the mixture cool, then mixed it with the other mint mixture. Then I strained it and added crushed ice and ginger ale individually to each cup as I made it, rather than adding it to the mixture as a whole as the recipe suggests.
We rate this drink a four out of five. To try it out for yourself, go to page 5 of the Southern Appalachian Mountain Cookbook by Ferne Shelton.
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