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July Cooler
Mix one and one half tablespoonfuls of raspberry syrup with one and one half tablespoonfuls of orange syrup. Add two tablespoonfuls of grape juice and the juice of one lime. Pour into a glass one third full of cracked ice and add Apollinaris. Stir well and decorate with cherries and pineapple cubes.
A temperance cooler built on fruit syrups and mineral water, assembled in the glass. The proportions are for a single tall drink of roughly 8 to 10 ounces.
- ApollinarisA naturally carbonated German mineral water, bottled from a spring in the Ahr valley and sold worldwide before the First World War. It is still available, but any dry sparkling mineral water works; it is there for fizz and a faint mineral edge, not sweetness.
- The syrupsRaspberry and orange syrup here mean soda-fountain syrups: fruit juice or extract sweetened heavily, usually a good deal denser than a 1:1 kitchen syrup. Modern bottled flavouring syrups are in the same territory; a homemade fruit syrup will do. Sweetness varies a lot between bottlings, so taste and trim back if needed.
- Grape juiceUnfermented bottled grape juice was closely associated with the temperance trade in this period, and the dark Concord type was the common commercial article; it is most likely what is meant here, and it supplies much of the drink's colour.
- MeasureA tablespoon is half a fluid ounce, so the flavouring base runs to about 2 1/2 ounces plus the lime juice. Top up with 5 to 6 ounces of sparkling water.
- Cracked iceNot neat cubes: ice broken into irregular pieces, smaller than a cube and larger than crushed. It melts into the drink faster than a cube. The recipe specifies a glass one third full.
- Order of workThe recipe pours the syrups, grape juice and lime over the ice, adds the Apollinaris, and only then says to stir well. Some cooks prefer to combine the syrup base first and stir gently after the water, since vigorous stirring drives off gas, but that is a departure from what is written.
- GarnishThe cherries were most likely bottled and the pineapple canned, both standard fountain stock at the time. Fresh fruit can be used instead, and will add less sugar than the packed kind.
- YieldOne glass. The base mixture scales cleanly for a pitcher, but add the sparkling water to each glass at the moment of serving.
This belongs to the genre of non-alcoholic drink collections that proliferated in the decade before national Prohibition, as temperance societies, hotels and druggists' soda fountains all needed a repertoire that looked and felt like a cocktail without the spirit. The era's slang for abstinence -- to be "on the water wagon" -- is usually traced to the horse-drawn carts that sprinkled dusty American streets, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. The technique is straight from the soda fountain counter -- measured syrups, a squeeze of citrus, cracked ice, charged water poured over -- and the reliance on branded bottled goods like Apollinaris and commercial grape juice reflects a trade that had grown up alongside the temperance movement.