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Grape and Raspberry
Mix together two tablespoonfuls of grape juice, two tablespoonfuls of pineapple syrup, and one tablespoonful of raspberry syrup. Add a teaspoonful of lime juice and two teaspoonfuls of lemon juice. Put in a tablespoonful of cracked ice and fill up with carbonated water. Decorate with a sprig of mint.
A soda-fountain build, not a mixed drink in the shaker sense: the syrups and juices go in first, the charged water last. Total flavoring is about a third of a cup, so the glass it is built in decides how strong it tastes.
- Glass sizeThe recipe does not name a glass, but the proportions suit something in the 8-to-10-ounce range. "Fill up" in a 16-ounce tumbler will give you faintly purple soda water; keep it small.
- Pineapple and raspberry syrupThese are fountain syrups — heavy sugar syrup carrying fruit juice — not the thin flavored syrups sold for coffee or the thick dessert sauce sold for sundaes. Bottled Italian-style soda syrups are the closest current equivalent; a dessert topping will be too heavy and will sink in a gluey layer.
- Grape juiceUnsweetened Concord juice is the likeliest thing meant, and it is still the right choice. Bottled white grape juice is blander and less tart, and will flatten the citrus.
- Cracked iceA tablespoonful of cracked ice is a token amount by modern habit. Cracked ice chills faster than cubes but dilutes faster too; fill the glass a third to half full and pour the water over it.
- Add the carbonated water lastPour it slowly down the inside of the glass rather than into the syrup. Dropping soda straight onto sugar syrup makes it foam up and lose much of its gas, which is the whole point of the drink.
- CitrusOne teaspoon lime and two of lemon means fresh juice; bottled reconstituted juice tastes of the bottle at this small a proportion. Do not stir hard afterward — a single lift with a bar spoon is enough.
- MintSlap the sprig once between your palms before setting it in the glass so the oils release. Left untouched it is only decoration.
- YieldOne glass. Multiply the syrups and juices for a pitcher, but charge each glass with soda individually.
This belongs to a genre of nonalcoholic drink books aimed at households and druggists' fountains — a genre that flourished both before and during Prohibition, as the American soda fountain took on some of the bar's social function. The building blocks here — grape juice, pineapple and raspberry syrups, a squeeze of citrus, carbonated water — are the pharmacy fountain's stock in trade, and the recipe is written in fountain shorthand, by the tablespoonful, for a dispenser working fast. Unfermented grape juice carried particular weight in temperance circles, having been promoted for decades as the respectable alternative to wine, including for communion, and it turns up in these collections often. The mint sprig may be a borrowing from the julep, one of several small gestures by which such drinks claimed some of the dignity of the cocktails they stood in for.