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Grape Royal
Put two tablespoonfuls of grape juice, one half tablespoonful of lemon juice, and one half tablespoonful of orange juice into a tall glass, half filled with cracked ice. Add two teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar. Stir well, and fill up the glass with ice-cold water. Garnish with a slice of orange or a piece of lemon peel.
A single tall drink, built in the glass and diluted to taste. The only real decisions are the grape juice and the sugar.
- Grape juiceAlmost certainly unfermented bottled juice, and in an American book of this date that generally meant Concord: sweet and strongly perfumed. Modern white grape or cold-pressed juice will taste thin here; use a dark Concord juice if you want something close to the intended flavor.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar dissolves fastest in cold liquid; ordinary granulated needs vigorous stirring or a splash of simple syrup instead.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons of juice in a tall glass is very dilute by current taste, closer to a flavored water than a grape drink. Doubling or tripling the grape juice is reasonable, in which case cut the sugar back.
- Cracked iceCracked, not cubed: broken shards chill and dilute quickly. Finished volume depends entirely on the glass, which the recipe does not specify; expect somewhere in the range of a modern tall tumbler.
- Order of workSugar goes in with the ice and juices and is stirred before the water is added, so it dissolves in the small volume of acid juice rather than in a full glass of water. Stir until you no longer feel grit on the bottom.
- YieldOne drink. The mixture scales cleanly to a pitcher: multiply the juices and sugar, hold back the water and ice until serving so it does not go flat and watery.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of temperance drink books published in the United States in the years around national Prohibition, when hostesses needed a repertoire of things to serve that looked like cocktails and punches but contained nothing fermented. "On the water wagon" was already common slang for abstaining, and the title makes the book's purpose plain. Unfermented grape juice was the emblematic ingredient of that movement: pasteurized bottled juice had been promoted since the late nineteenth century by temperance-minded producers, partly as a communion wine substitute, and by the 1910s it was cheap and widely available. The garnish here is modest — a single orange slice or a strip of lemon peel — though it is tempting to read the tall glass as social work, giving the abstainer something to hold that resembles what everyone else at the table has.