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Grape-Juice High Ball
Use Niagara grapes. Proceed as for recipe for chilled grape-juice. Serve in tall glasses half filled with shaved ice and add an equal quantity of charged water. Lemon is an attractive addition.
A two-ingredient cooler that depends entirely on the quality of the juice, since there is nothing else in the glass to hide behind.
- Charged waterThis is plain carbonated water — seltzer or club soda, not tonic and not a flavored sparkling water. Open it cold and pour it down the side of the glass to keep the fizz.
- Depends on another recipeThe instruction to "proceed as for recipe for chilled grape-juice" means you need that entry first; the page as printed does not say what it contains. Bottled unsweetened white grape juice, well chilled, stands in for it.
- Niagara grapesA white American slip-skin variety, aromatic and foxy in the same family as Concord. Fresh Niagaras appear only briefly in late summer at farm markets in the Northeast and Great Lakes; white Concord-type or bottled Niagara juice is the practical substitute.
- Shaved iceShaved or crushed ice, not cubes — it chills fast and dilutes as it goes, which is part of the drink. A few seconds in a blender or a canvas bag and a mallet will do it.
- ProportionsHalf the glass ice, then juice and charged water in equal measure. In a 12-ounce highball glass that works out to roughly 3 ounces of each.
- The lemonThe recipe says only that lemon is an attractive addition, without specifying juice or a wedge; a squeeze of juice suits it, since grape juice is flatly sweet and the acid is what keeps it from cloying.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon on 3 ounces of juice per drink; a 24-ounce bottle would make eight, though bottle sizes vary.
The highball name belongs to a family of tall drinks built on ice with a carbonated topper, and by the 1920s American cookbooks carried versions with the spirit taken out and the ritual left intact. Grape juice had a particular political charge: it was closely associated with the temperance cause, and commercial pasteurized grape juice in the United States is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who processed unfermented "communion wine" in the 1860s. Niagara, introduced commercially in the 1880s, was one of the white American varieties that made a pale, aromatic juice suited to a clear drink rather than the purple of Concord.