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Grape Cooler
Add the pulp and juice of one large grapefruit to one quart of grape juice, and one half cup of sugar. Mix well, put in punch bow! with plenty of cracked ice and a bottle of Apollinaris or Seltzer.
A punch-bowl cooler that needs almost nothing from a modern cook beyond a few substitutions and a lighter hand with the sugar. The one thing that matters: add the sparkling water at the last moment, over the ice, or the drink is flat before it reaches a glass.
- Grape juiceThe bottled grape juice of this period was unfermented Concord juice, sweet and deeply purple. Any 100% Concord juice gives the intended flavour; white grape juice will taste correct but look wrong.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, still sold, and a byword for table water in the early 1900s. Any dry seltzer or club soda substitutes; a bottle of the day was roughly a pint to a quart, so start with about 500 ml and add more to taste.
- The grapefruit"Pulp and juice" means the flesh as well, so segment the fruit over a bowl to catch the juice, and discard membrane, pith and seeds. The pith is where the harsh bitterness sits, and it will spoil the drink if it goes in.
- SugarHalf a cup for a quart likely reflects the sharper, less sweet grapefruit of the period, and the grape juice is already sweet. Dissolve the sugar in a little of the grape juice first as a syrup, then add it by degrees and stop when it tastes right.
- Cracked iceCracked ice melts fast and is doing double duty here as chilling and dilution. If you want the punch to hold its strength through a party, use a single large block or a frozen ring of grape juice instead.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts once the mineral water goes in, depending on the size of the bottle used. It scales straight up.
- ServingAssemble in the bowl, top with the seltzer, and ladle at once. A few grapes or thin grapefruit slices floated on top are in keeping with the period.
Books of this kind had a practical job: to give hostesses something to put in a punch bowl that looked and behaved like the alcoholic punches it replaced, which is why the recipes so often lean on grape juice, a bottled fruit syrup and a splash of imported mineral water. Unfermented grape juice had its own temperance pedigree, having been promoted from the 1860s onward by Methodist advocates as a communion wine substitute, and by 1914 it was an ordinary grocery item. Apollinaris, bottled from a spring in the German Ahr valley, was the prestige table water of the era and appears constantly in American drink books of the period as shorthand for good soda.