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Concord Favorite
Put two tablespoonfuls of grape syrup into a glass with a little shaved ice. Stir well and add a ladleful of vanilla ice cream. Fill up with soda water, and sprinkle with a little nutmeg or cinnamon.
A soda fountain formula, written for someone standing behind a marble counter with a syrup pump, a siphon and a tub of ice cream. Translated to a home kitchen it is straightforward, but the proportions assume fountain equipment.
- Grape syrup, not grape juiceThis calls for syrup: grape juice cooked down with sugar, thick enough to sink through soda water. Bottled grape juice will taste thin and watery here; simmer a cup of juice with a cup of sugar until it coats a spoon, then cool.
- A ladlefulRead this as a scoop of roughly 1/4 cup, the size of a modern #16 disher; two tablespoons of syrup to that much ice cream gives a workable ratio, though fountain ladles were not standardised.
- Glass sizeA tall glass of roughly 10 to 12 oz suits it; anything smaller will overflow the moment carbonated water hits the ice cream.
- Order mattersSyrup and shaved ice first, stirred until the syrup loosens, then the ice cream, then the soda water poured down the side of the glass in a slow stream. Adding soda to cold ice cream too fast produces a column of foam and very little drink.
- Soda waterUse the most sharply carbonated seltzer available, straight from a fresh bottle or a siphon. Club soda with added mineral salts reads slightly savoury against grape; plain seltzer is better.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed. It chills instantly and dissolves into the drink rather than sitting in the way of the straw. A few seconds of cubes in a blender or a canvas bag and a mallet will do it.
- The spiceGrate the nutmeg fresh over the finished foam. Pre-ground nutmeg sinks and tastes dusty, and the whole point of the garnish is the aroma at the first sip.
- YieldOne glass. Everything in the recipe scales directly if you are making several, but build them one at a time so the foam is still standing when they reach the table.
The Concord grape is one of the few American food plants with a firm birth date and address: Ephraim Wales Bull selected it from wild Vitis labrusca seedlings in Concord, Massachusetts, and introduced it around 1854. Its second career began when Thomas Bramwell Welch, a dentist and Methodist communion steward, applied Pasteur's method to Concord juice in the 1860s to produce an unfermented sacramental wine, and by the early twentieth century bottled grape juice was firmly identified with the temperance cause. That is exactly why this drink is in this book. On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon collected several hundred non-alcoholic drinks that could be made at home during the years when Prohibition was arriving, and the soda fountain, with its syrups, siphons and ice cream, became the respectable substitute for the bar counter. The grape ice cream soda is a temperance drink twice over: the fruit and the setting both stood for the pledge.