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Currant Cup
Mix with a quart of lemonade one pint of currant juice. Sweeten to taste. Chill and serve in glasses three quarters full of cracked ice and add a spoonful of currant or lemon water ice.
A three-ingredient cooler that depends entirely on the quality of the currant juice. The proportions are a starting point: currants vary enormously in acidity, so the sweetening is done last and by taste.
- QuantitiesA quart of lemonade to a pint of currant juice is a 2:1 ratio, giving about six cups before ice. That serves four to six in tall glasses, less if you pour generously.
- The lemonade should be weakThe lemonade is best kept on the weak side -- lemonade of this era was generally about the juice of a lemon with a spoonful or two of sugar to a glass of water. Since the currant juice brings its own sharp acid, a lemonade made at full strength may push the finished cup very sour, though the instruction to sweeten to taste is there to correct for it.
- Finding currant juiceRed currants were a common dooryard fruit in 1919 but vanished from much of the United States after states banned Ribes plantings to control white pine blister rust. Most of those bans have since been lifted or relaxed; failing fresh fruit, look for unsweetened red currant juice or nectar in European groceries, or thaw frozen currants and press them.
- Making the juiceCrush ripe currants, warm them gently just until the juice runs, then strain through a jelly bag without squeezing if you want it clear. Currants are high in pectin, so a hard press gives cloudy juice that will thicken slightly on standing.
- Sweeten with syrup, not sugarGranulated sugar dissolves slowly and grittily in a cold drink. Make a simple syrup of equal parts sugar and water, cool it, and add it by the spoonful until the balance is right.
- "Water ice"This means a sorbet or granita made from sweetened fruit juice and water, with no dairy and no egg. Any good lemon or berry sorbet stands in; the recipe asks only for a spoonful, which chills and dilutes the drink as it melts.
- Cracked iceCoarse shards, not cubes and not shaved snow. Wrap ice in a clean towel and strike it with a rolling pin, or pulse cubes briefly in a food processor.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of non-alcoholic drink books published as national Prohibition approached, offering hostesses something to put in a punch bowl that was not punch. Many of its fruit cups lean on sorbet and cracked ice for body. Red currants were the natural choice: they were a standard kitchen-garden crop in the northeastern states, generally reckoned too tart to eat out of hand, and traditionally turned into jelly, shrub or juice for exactly this kind of summer drink. Within a few decades federal and state programs to protect white pine forests from blister rust, which uses Ribes species as an alternate host, had made the currant a rarity in American gardens, and a drink that once assumed a bush in the back yard became one that requires a specialty shop.