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Holiday Lemonade
Add a little currant or raspberry juice to plain lemonade, and serve with pieces of pineapple and banana.
Grape Lemonade No. 1 Mix one fourth glass of grape juice with a glass of plain lemonade, and serve with cracked ice.
Grape Lemonade No. 2 Pour enough ice-cold lemonade into a glass to nearly fill it, and add very carefully grape juice to fill the glass.
Three variations on a base the book assumes you already have on hand. The only real technique here is in Grape Lemonade No. 2, which is a layered drink and depends entirely on how you pour.
- "Plain lemonade" is the missing ingredientThe recipe assumes a base the book supplies elsewhere. A typical period proportion is the juice of one lemon and a tablespoon or two of sugar topped up with cold water. Dissolve the sugar in a little hot water or make a simple syrup first, since granulated sugar will not dissolve in ice water.
- A "glass" is about 8 ouncesA "glass" here is a tumbler, on the order of 6 to 8 ounces. On that reading the "one fourth glass" of grape juice in No. 1 is roughly 2 ounces, added to a full glass of lemonade. Each variation makes one drink.
- Grape juice means unfermented ConcordGrape juice here means unfermented bottled juice, in 1919 most often sweet Concord, dark purple and sweet. Modern Concord juice is a reasonable stand-in; white grape juice will not give the colour the drink is built around, and wine is not what is intended in this temperance book.
- Currant and raspberry juiceThese could be home-pressed and sweetened, closer to a thin syrup than to today's cartoned juice. Crush the fruit, strain through a jelly bag, and sweeten to taste; a tablespoon or two per glass is enough to colour and flavour the lemonade without swamping the lemon.
- The hinge in No. 2 is the pourThe recipe says to add the grape juice "very carefully" so it does not simply muddle into the lemonade. Pour it slowly down the inside of a tilted glass or over the back of a spoon and it will hold, at least briefly, as a visible band of colour before settling.
- Ice"cracked ice" came off a block with a pick, and small irregular pieces chill faster; a few cubes will do. Note that No. 2 asks only for ice-cold lemonade rather than ice in the glass, which would in any case disturb the pour.
- The fruit garnishPineapple, fresh or canned, was readily available by 1919. Cut it into small pieces that will sit in the glass or on the rim, and add the banana at the last moment, since cut banana discolours on standing.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the small library of drink books published in the run-up to national Prohibition, when a genuine commercial market opened for non-alcoholic recipes that a hostess could serve without apology. "On the water wagon" was already common slang for abstaining, and the title makes the book's allegiance plain. The reliance on bottled grape juice is telling: unfermented grape juice had become the emblematic temperance drink in America, promoted heavily by the Welch family, and it was famously served in place of wine at State Department functions by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a teetotaller, which earned it a good deal of press and a certain amount of mockery. Recipes like these did the quiet work of showing that colour, layering and a garnish of fruit could carry a drink that had nothing else in it.