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Grape Frappe
4 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 cups grape juice 2/3 cup orange juice 1/4 cup lemon juice Prepare and freeze same as Pineapple Frappe.
A frappé in this period is a coarse-grained water ice, frozen with constant agitation until it is the texture of wet snow rather than a solid block. The whole method sits in the cross-reference, so here is what "prepare and freeze same as Pineapple Frappe" assumes.
- The hinge: freeze it softA frappé is not a sorbet. It should be churned or scraped only until it holds a mounded spoonful, still slushy and pourable at the edges. Frozen hard it becomes a granita brick and loses the point of the dish.
- Make the syrup firstThe method is not given here, but period ices of this type normally began by boiling the water and sugar together briefly to dissolve the sugar and then cooling it before the fruit juices went in. Adding juice to hot syrup dulls the fresh grape flavour.
- Freezing without an ice-cream freezerThe original assumes a hand-crank churn packed with ice and coarse rock salt; period manuals commonly give something in the region of three parts ice to one part salt. In a modern kitchen, pour into a wide shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours; a machine on the sorbet setting also works if you stop it early.
- Grape juiceMost likely unsweetened bottled juice, Concord being the usual American variety. Modern sweetened grape drink or cocktail will push the mixture over the edge into syrup; if that is all you have, cut the sugar by about a third.
- CitrusUse fresh juice for both. The 1/4 cup lemon is there as much for balance as for flavour, since the acid keeps the sugar-heavy base from tasting flat.
- Sugar and textureTwo cups of sugar to four of water is a fairly heavy syrup, which is deliberate: sugar lowers the freezing point and prevents a solid mass. Cut it back much and you will get ice rather than frappe.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 quarts or a little more, serving 8 to 10 in small glasses. Serve immediately in chilled stemmed glasses, or spoon it over a plain steamed or baked pudding.
Frappe comes from the French frapper, to strike, used of chilled or iced drinks; such frozen ices appear in American cookbooks through the later nineteenth century, sometimes served between courses or over a plain pudding as well as as a dessert. Grape versions spread as pasteurized unfermented grape juice became commercially bottled and promoted in the United States, in part by temperance-minded producers offering it as an alternative to wine, and by the early twentieth century bottled grape juice was a common pantry item in punches, gelatins and ices. The reliance on a churn packed with ice and rock salt suggests a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration, where freezing meant buying or cutting ice.