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Fruit Frappe
Place 2 tablespoons of mixed fruit juices (orange, lemon and pineapple) in a tall glass. Add to this simple syrup to taste and a spoonful of ice. Fill the glass with carbonated water and garnish with thin slices of lemon and orange. Individual serving.
A soda-fountain drink built directly in the glass, of the kind American cookbooks carried through the 1920s and 1930s. The proportions are loose by design, but a few points make it behave.
- "A spoonful of ice"This means shaved or finely crushed ice, the fountain man's scoop, not cubes. Crushed ice is what gives a frappe its texture; cubes will simply dilute the drink as they melt.
- Simple syrupEqual weights sugar and water, heated only until clear, then cooled. Keep a jar in the refrigerator for a week or two. Start with 2 teaspoons per glass and adjust to taste.
- The juice ratioTwo tablespoons of juice in a tall glass makes a very light drink, closer to a flavoured seltzer than a juice soda. The recipe gives no proportions; a mix weighted towards orange with smaller amounts of lemon and pineapple is one workable choice, and increasing to a quarter cup total will make the fruit read more clearly.
- Carbonated waterPlain seltzer or club soda, well chilled. Warm soda water foams over the crushed ice and goes flat before the glass is full. Pour down the side of the glass, slowly.
- Pineapple juiceFresh pineapple juice develops off flavours quickly, so use it soon after pressing; canned or bottled juice has been heated and keeps.
- YieldOne tall glass, about 10 to 12 ounces. The mixed juice and syrup scale easily if you are making a pitcher's worth of base to carbonate glass by glass.
- GarnishCut the lemon and orange slices thin enough to slip down inside the glass rather than perch on the rim.
Frappé is French for "iced" — the past participle of frapper, to strike, applied to drinks chilled by being shaken or churned with ice. American soda fountains took up the word for drinks served over shaved ice, and used it loosely enough that a frappe could mean a semi-frozen dessert in one book and a fizzy fruit drink in the next. Recipes like this one belong to the era when the drugstore fountain was a standard place to buy a cold soft drink, and cookbooks taught the home cook to reproduce the counter's repertoire: a splash of fruit syrup or juice, sweetening to taste, shaved ice and a squirt of charged water. Books of this period gave such light beverages a place alongside or in preference to heavier punches and wine cups, which in American books of the 1920s and early 1930s is plausibly connected to Prohibition as well as to fashion.