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Hot Grape Juice
Mix two tablespoonfuls each of grape juice and lemon syrup with enough hot water to fill a glass.
A two-ingredient hot drink from a temperance recipe book; the only real questions are what "lemon syrup" means and how hot the water should be.
- Lemon syrupNot bottled lemonade concentrate. Period lemon syrup is a sugar-and-water syrup boiled down, with lemon juice and sometimes zest stirred in off the heat; proportions varied and many versions were considerably sweeter than equal parts. A homemade one will keep a week or two refrigerated.
- The glassA tumbler of the period holds about 8 fluid ounces; the two tablespoons each of grape juice and lemon syrup come to about 2 ounces, leaving roughly 6 ounces of hot water. That is a light drink by modern taste; a third more of each syrup makes it read closer to a hot cordial.
- Grape juiceThis most likely means unfermented bottled juice, which in America of this period usually meant Concord: sweeter and more assertively 'grapey' than most European grape juice sold today. The recipe itself does not specify. Look for 100 percent Concord if you want that flavor.
- Water temperatureUse water just off the boil rather than boiling. Hard-boiled grape juice turns flat and slightly stewed, and the lemon aroma blows off immediately.
- Assembly orderPut the two syrups in the glass first and pour the water over them; a brief stir may still be wanted. Adding syrup to a full glass of hot water leaves a sweet slug at the bottom.
- GlasswareIf you are serving in glass rather than a mug, use something thick or preheat it with hot tap water first. Thin tumblers crack.
- YieldOne glass. Scale directly, or make a jug of the two syrups in a 1:1 ratio and add hot water by the cup.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of American recipe collections published as the temperance movement gathered legal force in the 1910s, offering hostesses something to pour that was not wine or punch. Unfermented grape juice was the emblematic drink of that campaign: Concord juice had been commercialized in the later nineteenth century partly for use as communion wine by congregations that objected to alcohol, and it became a standard base for the era's "fruit cups" and hot beverages. A hot grape and lemon drink like this one was pitched as a winter alternative to a toddy or a glass of mulled wine.