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Grape and Pineapple
Mix two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup and four tablespoonfuls of grape juice. Add soda water and pour from glass to glass to blend thoroughly, using the syphon at the last.
A soda-fountain formula written for someone standing at a marble counter with a syrup rail and a carbonating syphon. It translates easily to a home kitchen once you know what the two liquids actually are.
- Pineapple syrupNot canned pineapple juice. Fountain syrup was a heavy sweetened syrup flavoured with pineapple; the proportions varied from house to house. Simmer a cup of pineapple juice with a cup of sugar until the sugar dissolves, cool, and use that.
- Grape juiceHere this meant unfermented bottled Concord juice, the Welch's style product that temperance drinkers had adopted with enthusiasm. Any unsweetened Concord juice gives the right dark, musky character; white grape juice does not.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons syrup to four of grape juice is about 1 oz to 2 oz, a single glass. Top with 6 to 8 oz of soda water for a tall drink, less if you want it sharper.
- Pouring from glass to glassThe fountain man's method of mixing without a spoon, done with two tumblers held apart so the streams aerate. It works, but it costs carbonation. A brief stir with a long spoon before the final syphon charge loses less fizz.
- The syphon at the lastThis is the hinge. The final hard jet of carbonated water from the syphon lifts the syrup off the bottom and puts the head on the drink, so the charge goes in after mixing, not before. Any pressurised soda water, or a stiff pour of bottled club soda down the centre, does the same job.
- YieldOne glass. Scale the syrup and juice in the same 1:2 ratio for a pitcher, but carbonate each glass separately.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of soda-fountain and temperance drink books published in the years when Prohibition was moving from a movement to a near certainty; the title itself puns on the water wagon, often said to be the horse-drawn street-sprinkling cart that gave English the phrase for going dry. Bottled unfermented grape juice was the emblematic drink of that cause, and it is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who pasteurised Concord juice in the 1860s to supply communion tables that would not use wine. By the 1910s the soda fountain had absorbed it, and combinations like this one, a fruit syrup and a fruit juice lengthened with carbonated water, were the working vocabulary of the trade: cheap, bright, alcohol-free, and mixed to order in front of the customer.