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Grape Ginger Punch
Squeeze the juice from five lemons, and put into a punch bowl with one cup of sugar, several bruised mint leaves, and one half cup of cold water. Stir well to dissolve the sugar, and let stand for half an hour. Then put in a large piece of ice, add one pint of grape juice and quart of ginger ale. Decorate with thin slices of lemon.
A straightforward party punch that depends almost entirely on the half-hour rest at the start. Everything else is assembly.
- The half hour mattersThe wait is a maceration: the sugar-lemon-mint mixture becomes a mint syrup, which is how most of the mint flavour gets into the drink. Skip it and the mint barely registers. Bruise the mint with a spoon or muddler rather than tearing or chopping it.
- Lemons then and nowFive lemons yield roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of juice depending on size. Modern supermarket lemons vary widely, so measure and adjust rather than counting fruit.
- Grape juiceThis means unfermented bottled Concord grape juice, the product that made this style of book possible. Concord is still sold and is the right choice; it is much sweeter and more aromatic than a red wine grape juice would be.
- Ginger aleMany ginger ales of the period were drier and sharper than the sweeter mass-market brands common now. A dry ginger ale keeps the punch from tipping into candy; if using a sweet one, cut the sugar somewhat.
- The large piece of iceA single block, not cubes. It chills the bowl while melting slowly, so the punch does not dilute over an hour of serving. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a small bowl the day before.
- Order of assemblyAdd the grape juice and ginger ale last and stir once, gently. Vigorous stirring after the ginger ale goes in flattens the carbonation, which is doing much of the work here.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts before the ice melts, which is twelve to sixteen small punch cups, or six to eight tumblers.
- StrainingThe original leaves the mint in. Strain the syrup before adding the ice if you would rather not fish leaves out of cups; the flavour is already extracted.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of books that appeared as national prohibition moved from a temperance argument to a legal fact, offering the hostess a full repertoire of drinks that would not embarrass her. The title is a joke on "on the water wagon," the older form of the phrase we now say as "on the wagon." Punches like this one carried the burden: they looked ceremonial in a cut-glass bowl, they were built around bottled fruit juices that had only recently become reliable grocery items, and the sharpness of ginger ale and lemon stood in for the bite of something stronger. Unfermented grape juice in particular had a temperance pedigree, generally traced to Thomas B. Welch, whose unfermented wine dates from 1869 and was offered partly as a communion wine substitute, though it became a substantial commercial grocery product only later under his son. The result is a drink whose whole design is to be festive without alcohol -- mint, ice, thin lemon wheels, a bowl -- and it still works on those terms.</p>