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Grapejuice Lemonade
Juice 3 oranges Juice 6 lemons 1 pt. grapejuice-sweeten with syrup of sugar and water.
Dilute with water. Serves 20.
A church-supper punch that assumes you know how thin to stretch it. The only real decisions are the syrup and the final dilution.
- Syrup first"Syrup of sugar and water" is simple syrup: equal parts by volume, heated only until clear, then cooled. Adding dry sugar to cold juice leaves grit at the bottom of the bowl.
- How much syrupStart with about a cup of syrup for this quantity of juice and taste after diluting, since grape juice is naturally sweet and lemons vary. Sweeten before the final water goes in, not after.
- Dilution to serve 20The juices and grape juice come to roughly a quart; with a cup of syrup, about five cups of mixture. To stretch that to twenty servings you will need something like two to two and a half quarts of water, so figure on rather more water than juice mixture.
- GrapejuiceA pint means 2 cups of unfermented bottled grape juice, most likely the sweet purple Concord kind. Modern white grape juice will taste right but lose the color.
- Juice yieldsThree oranges give about 1 cup, six lemons about 1 cup. If your citrus is small, measure to those figures rather than counting fruit.
- ChillingChill the components and add ice at the last moment, or dilute with cold water and ice separately. Ice melting in the bowl for an hour turns twenty servings into weak ones.
Grape juice punches like this one belong to a specific moment in American church cookery: the decades when Protestant congregations, and the temperance movement behind them, wanted festive drinks that carried no alcohol. Commercially pasteurized unfermented grape juice became widely available in the United States in the late nineteenth century and was taken up enthusiastically for communion and for socials alike, which is why a community cookbook can file a recipe like this under "Beverages" with no apology and no spirits in sight. The construction — citrus juice, a bottled fruit juice, sugar syrup, water, scaled to serve twenty — is the standard shape of the parish-hall punch, written for a cook who expected to be handed a bowl and a crowd.