Home › Grape Juice › Grape Cobbler
Grape Cobbler
Put two tablespoonfuls of grape juice into a small glass with a little cracked ice and fill up the glass with ginger ale. Serve with straws.
A two-ingredient temperance drink that lives or dies on the quality of the grape juice and the coldness of the glass. A few notes on scale and substitution.
- Glass sizeA "small glass" in a soda-fountain context is probably something on the order of 6 to 8 ounces. Two tablespoons of juice in that volume gives a faintly tinted, mostly-ginger-ale drink; a 4-ounce glass makes it noticeably grapier.
- The grape juiceThe book most likely means unfermented bottled Concord juice, sweet and strongly foxy in flavour. Modern white grape juice or a European red will read as thin and generic here; Concord is the closest to the original.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice was chipped from a block; note the recipe asks only for "a little," so it chilled fast without filling the glass. Crushed ice from a blender or a bag is the nearest equivalent; whole cubes leave the drink warmer and sweeter.
- Ginger ale of the periodCommercial ginger ale then was often drier and more sharply gingery than most supermarket brands now, though sweeter golden styles existed alongside the pale dry ones. A dry ginger ale keeps the drink from tasting like grape soda.
- Why it is called a cobblerA cobbler is defined by the ice, not by fruit filling and pastry. Build it in the glass over the ice rather than shaking, and stir only once or twice so the carbonation survives.
- YieldOne glass. Multiply straight across for a pitcher, but add the ginger ale to each glass at the moment of serving.
This comes from a collection of drinks for American hostesses who needed a repertoire that looked and felt like cocktails without the spirits. The cobbler was a natural model to borrow: in the nineteenth-century bar it meant a spirit or wine poured over a glass packed with fine ice and drunk through a straw, and the sherry cobbler in particular was among the most famous American drinks abroad, singled out by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. Strip out the sherry, substitute bottled grape juice and top with ginger ale, and the form survives intact. Unfermented grape juice was itself a product of the temperance movement, its commercial production generally traced to the Welch family of New Jersey in the 1860s, who promoted it as a communion wine for congregations that would not serve alcohol — which makes it exactly the right base for a drink like this one.