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Mulled Grape Juice
2 sticks cinnamon 1 dozen whole cloves 1 quart grape juice 1 pint water 1 cup sugar 2 lemons Put spices in bag, and put in saucepan with grape juice, sugar and water; let it heat slowly until it steams; stir well and let stand on back of stove for 10 minutes; add juice of lemons and thin yellow rind of one lemon, peel off in a strip. Bring all to boiling point; take out lemon peel. If more sugar is desired, add at this time. Serve very hot with the Thanksgiving supper. Serves 6.
A straightforward hot spiced punch that needs only a few adjustments for a modern range, where there is no cool back corner to hold a pan at a steady low heat.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range the rear was a warm zone well below a simmer. Use the lowest burner setting, or pull the pan off the heat entirely and cover it for the ten-minute steep.
- Do not boil hardThe hinge of the drink. Grape juice turns flat and slightly cooked-tasting once it boils for any length of time, and the lemon rind gives up bitter oils. Bring it just to the first break of bubbles and stop.
- Spice bagA tea ball, a coffee filter tied with string, or a square of cheesecloth all work. Loose cloves are easy to strain out later if you have no bag, but the cinnamon sticks should come out regardless.
- Sugar levelA cup of sugar into a quart of juice is very sweet by current taste, and modern bottled grape juice is already intensely sweet on its own, with some products carrying added sugar besides. Start with a third of that and adjust at the end, as the recipe itself invites.
- Grape juiceThe recipe says only 'grape juice'; unsweetened Concord, the dominant American bottled juice of the period, is the likeliest match. Cocktail-style grape blends will oversweeten the pot before you add any sugar at all.
- Lemon rindTake the strip with a peeler and avoid the white pith. It goes in only at the end and comes straight back out, so it perfumes without turning the punch bitter.
- YieldThe recipe says it serves 6; a quart of juice plus a pint of water and the lemon juice comes to roughly eight ounces a glass.
Mulled drinks predate the recipe by centuries — heating wine or cider with cinnamon, cloves and citrus is medieval European practice — but grape juice as the base is distinctly American and distinctly modern. Unfermented bottled grape juice was commercialised in the late nineteenth century and was promoted heavily by temperance advocates as a substitute for wine, at the communion table and at the punch bowl alike. By the time this book appeared, a hot spiced grape punch let a household serve something ceremonial and warming at a Thanksgiving supper without alcohol on the table, which is exactly the role the recipe assigns it.