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California Punch
Mix one quart of white grape juice with one quart of Apollinaris and serve very cold in punch bowl, decorated with bunches of white grapes and leaves.
A two-ingredient punch that lives or dies on temperature and on the quality of the grape juice. Everything else is garnish.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated mineral water from the Ahr valley in Germany, sold in the United States as "the Queen of Table Waters" and once as common in bar and sickroom as soda. Any well-carbonated sparkling mineral water stands in; a mineral-rich one such as Gerolsteiner is closer to the original than seltzer.
- White grape juiceModern bottled white grape juice is usually Niagara- or Thompson-based, and is likely to be sweeter than the period product. Taste before mixing, and if it is cloying, shift the ratio toward the mineral water rather than adding sugar or citrus.
- Chill everything separatelyThere is no ice in the recipe and none should be added to the bowl, since melt would flatten it. Refrigerate both bottles overnight and chill the punch bowl as well; combine at the last moment so the carbonation survives being served.
- YieldTwo quarts, or roughly sixteen small punch-cup servings of four ounces. For a standing party, plan on two to three cups a head and mix in batches as the bowl empties.
- The garnishSmall bunches of white grapes with the leaves still attached were the whole visual point, since the drink itself is nearly colorless. Wash the leaves well; grocery grapes rarely arrive with them, so vine leaves from a garden or a farmers' market are worth seeking out.
- Grapes as iceLoose grapes frozen on a tray can be floated in the bowl to keep it cold without dilution, which is in keeping with the recipe's logic even if the author does not suggest it.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the American temperance drinks literature of the early twentieth century, when hostesses under pressure from the dry movement needed punches that looked like punches without alcohol. The name of this one nods to California's grape industry, which by the 1910s was shipping enormous quantities of table grapes and juice east by rail and which continued to trade in juice and fresh fruit through the Prohibition years, though much of that traffic in practice supplied home winemaking. Apollinaris water, imported from Germany, was the prestige sparkling water of the period and appears constantly in cocktail and invalid-cookery books alike; its presence here signals that this was meant as a fashionable drink rather than a makeshift. The structure -- one fruit juice, one sparkling water, fruit and leaves on top -- is the standard template of the genre, and the recipes of this kind that survive say a good deal about how seriously the social question of what to serve was taken.