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Grape Nectar
Make a syrup of one pound of sugar and one half pint of water. When cool add the juice of four lemons, and a quart of grape juice. Put on ice to chill thoroughly and serve with Apollinaris.
A temperance-era cordial syrup, meant to be diluted at the glass rather than drunk straight. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions assume a sweeter palate and a sparkling water most readers have never poured.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. With a pound of sugar (about 2 1/4 cups) that makes a heavy syrup, close to a 2:1 sugar-to-water ratio by volume. Stir over low heat only until the sugar dissolves and the liquid runs clear; it does not need to reach any candy stage.
- Cool before the lemon goes inThe instruction is deliberate. Fresh lemon juice added to hot syrup loses its top notes fast and turns faintly cooked. Let the syrup come to room temperature or below first.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water from the Ahr valley, marketed for decades as the "Queen of Table Waters" and a fixture of American soda fountains and hotel bars. Any strongly carbonated mineral water stands in; a soft, lightly fizzed sparkling water will leave the drink flat and cloying.
- The grape juiceMost likely unfermented Concord juice, dark and quite sweet, whether bottled and pasteurized or pressed at home. Use unsweetened juice if you can find it, or the syrup quantity will overwhelm everything else.
- Proportions at the glassThe recipe gives no dilution rate. Treat the finished mixture as a cordial base: roughly one part nectar to two or three parts sparkling water over ice, adjusted to taste. Undiluted it is syrup, not a beverage.
- YieldCloser to one and three-quarter quarts of concentrate, which stretches to 12-18 tall glasses once charged with mineral water. Keep the base covered in the refrigerator and use within a week.
- Chilling"Put on ice" meant a bowl set into an ice chest or a packed ice bath. Refrigeration overnight does the same job with less drama.
Books like this one appeared alongside the long American temperance campaign, which needed something to put in the punch bowl once wine was off the table. Unfermented grape juice was the movement's great technical triumph: the Methodist dentist Thomas Bramwell Welch, working in Vineland, New Jersey, began bottling pasteurized Concord juice in 1869 as a sacramental "unfermented wine," and by the turn of the century commercial grape juice was cheap, sweet and widely available. Pairing it with Apollinaris, an imported sparkling mineral water that carried genuine social cachet in hotel dining rooms, let a hostess serve something that looked and sounded like a bar drink.