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Grape Juice Rickey
Fill a glass one third full of cracked ice and pour over the juice of one lime. Add a tablespoonful of plain syrup, fill half full of grape juice, and add clear cold water or Seltzer. Decorate with slices of lime.
A three-ingredient soda-fountain drink that assumes you know what a rickey is: lime, sweetener, ice, fizz. The proportions are given by glass volume rather than by measure, so the glass you choose does most of the deciding.
- Plain syrupSimple syrup: sugar dissolved in water, heated only until clear, then cooled. Soda-fountain "plain syrup" was often richer than equal parts. Either way a single tablespoon adds little sugar, so the finished drink is barely sweet against unsweetened grape juice.
- The glassUse an 8 to 10 oz highball; in anything larger the "half full of grape juice" instruction produces a drink that is mostly juice with a splash of water.
- Cracked iceIce broken small, not cubes and not crushed to slush. It chills fast and dilutes steadily, which is part of the intended balance here since no shaking is involved. Cubes will leave the drink sweeter and warmer.
- Grape juiceAt the time this meant pasteurized unsweetened Concord juice, dark purple and quite tart. Modern grape juice blends and "grape drink" are considerably sweeter; if using one, cut the syrup or leave it out.
- LimeOne lime yields roughly one to two tablespoons of juice, so it sits broadly in balance with the tablespoon of syrup. Roll and juice it fresh; bottled lime juice has a cooked note that shows badly in a drink this plain.
- Seltzer or still waterThe recipe offers both. Seltzer gives the sharper, drier version closer to a true rickey; plain cold water makes something nearer a grape lemonade. Add it last and stir once, gently, if carbonated.
- YieldOne glass. Scale by the glass rather than mixing a pitcher, since the ice-to-liquid ratio is what holds the proportions together.
The rickey arrived as a whiskey drink in Washington in the early 1880s, generally traced to Colonel Joe Rickey and the bar at Shoomaker's, and by the 1890s the gin version had become the standard summer highball: spirit, the juice and shell of a lime, ice, carbonated water, and traditionally no sugar at all. What makes this version interesting is the company it keeps. On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the run of temperance drink books published in the years before national Prohibition, when the pressure was on to prove that a teetotaler need not drink lemonade all summer. The method here is to keep the familiar bar formula and its familiar name, swap grape juice for the gin, and add a little syrup to soften what the alcohol used to carry. Grape juice was the obvious substitute, and it acquired a specifically political reputation when William Jennings Bryan, as Secretary of State, served it in place of wine at official dinners in 1913 — a decision the newspapers mocked and the dry movement embraced.