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Peach Cocktail
Peel and stone peaches, cut very fine or run through coarse vegetable grinder; sweeten to taste, To 12 large peaches add the juice of 3 lemons, 1 orange and 1 qt. water. Serve very cold in tall glasses. Mrs. Paul Ray.
For a refreshing drink mix equal parts of lemonade, ginger ale, and grape juice.
Vary to suit taste; - if liked, the juice of canned fruits may be added -also a teaspoon of chopped fruit, and if obtainable, a sprig of mint. Mrs. Elizabeth Kohner.
Two unrelated non-alcoholic drinks share the page: a peach crush and a fruit punch. Both are assembled rather than cooked, so the whole result rests on ripe fruit and hard chilling.
- Add the citrus firstGround peach flesh browns within minutes. Squeeze the lemons and orange into the bowl before you start grinding and turn the fruit into the juice as it comes off the blade.
- "Coarse vegetable grinder"A hand-cranked food mill or grinder with the large plate. A food processor works if you pulse three or four times; run it continuously and you get thin purée with no texture left.
- Twelve large peachesRoughly 4 to 5 lb, which will give somewhere between 5 and 7 cups of ground pulp depending on size. With the quart of water and the juice, the batch comes to about 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, which is six to eight tall glasses.
- Sweeten to taste, but do it in syrupGranulated sugar stirred into cold pulp stays gritty. Dissolve it in a little of the water first, or use simple syrup, and add it gradually since ripe freestone peaches may need very little.
- Grape juice means ConcordThe bottled grape juice sold for church and temperance use was unfermented Concord, sweet and strongly perfumed. Modern Concord juice is the same thing; white grape juice gives a much flatter punch.
- Mix the punch at the last minuteGinger ale goes flat quickly once it is stirred into a bowl of cold juice. Combine the lemonade and grape juice ahead, chill them, and pour in the ginger ale as you serve.
- Canned fruit syrupThe suggested juice from canned fruit is much sweeter than anything sold as juice today. Add it a few tablespoons at a time and taste, or the punch turns cloying.
- Serve very cold, not icedBoth drinks are already diluted with water or ginger ale. Chill the mixture and the glasses rather than filling the glass with ice cubes.
A "cocktail" in a church cook book is a reminder that the word, which began as a name for an alcoholic mixed drink, was later extended to small, sharp things served at the start of a meal or a party, with no alcohol implied — fruit cocktail, oyster cocktail, tomato cocktail. Church cook books of the Prohibition era and after leaned hard on this sense, and their beverage chapters are full of fruit crushes, punches and ginger-ale mixtures meant for socials, bazaars and Sunday-school suppers. The peach drink here belongs to the brief late-summer window when ripe freestones were cheap; the second recipe, built on three bottled ingredients that keep in a pantry, is the year-round version for a crowd. Grape juice earned its place in these books partly through the temperance movement's promotion of unfermented juice, which is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch's 1869 pasteurized "unfermented wine" for communion.