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Grape Juice and Banana
Grate the rind of one lemon and two oranges, and mix with the strained juice and one mashed banana. Add one half pint of grape juice, one and one half cups of sugar, and three pints of water. Strain through a fine sieve, and serve in small glasses. The stiffly beaten whites of two eggs added to this mixture and frozen makes a delicious dessert.
A temperance punch built on citrus zest and bottled grape juice, with a note at the end turning the same mixture into a frozen dessert. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are quantities and the raw-egg variation.
- Half a pint of grape juiceOne cup. Total volume comes to roughly two quarts, so the grape juice is a flavour accent rather than the base.
- Which grape juiceProbably unsweetened bottled Concord juice, dark purple and strongly flavoured. Modern grape juice blends and sweetened cocktails will push the drink sugary; if yours is already sweet, start with half the sugar and taste.
- SugarOne and a half cups in roughly two quarts is noticeably sweeter than most people now drink. Dissolve it in a little hot water first so it does not sit as grit in the bottom of the pitcher.
- Zest, then juiceGrate the lemon and oranges before you cut them; the oils in the peel are doing most of the flavouring work here. A rasp grater gives you fine zest that will actually pass through, or at least surrender its oil to, the sieve.
- Let it standThe recipe strains immediately, but the zest needs time. Half an hour in the sugar and juice before straining makes a marked difference, and the mixture is better still after an hour or two cold.
- Small glassesPunch cups of about four ounces; two quarts fills twelve to sixteen of them.
- The frozen versionBeaten whites folded into a liquid and frozen without churning gives a coarse, foamy ice rather than a smooth sorbet. Stir it two or three times during freezing to break up crystals, or churn it if you have an ice cream maker.
- Raw egg whitesThe whites are never cooked in the dessert variation. Use pasteurised whites from a carton, or leave them out and accept a firmer granita, particularly if serving children or anyone with a compromised immune system.
Grape juice was closely associated with the American temperance movement. The commercial product is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist who in 1869 pasteurised Concord juice to keep it from fermenting, intending it as an unfermented communion wine; by the early twentieth century his family's bottled juice had become a staple of church socials and Prohibition-era entertaining. It gained a certain notoriety in 1913 when Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a teetotaller, served grape juice instead of wine at an official diplomatic dinner.