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Lime and Grape Juice
Put one tablespoonful of vanilla syrup, one tablespoonful of pineapple syrup, and two tablespoonfuls of grape juice into a glass two thirds full of cracked ice. Add the juice of half a lime, and fill up the glass with soda water.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a home drink, written for someone standing behind a marble counter with a rack of flavoring syrups and a carbonator. Everything scales to one tall glass.
- Vanilla and pineapple syrupThese are fountain syrups: heavy sugar syrup flavored with extract or fruit. Canned pineapple juice reduced with sugar stands in for the pineapple. Commercial snow-cone syrups are thinner and much sweeter, so cut back if using them.
- Grape juiceIn this period this meant unfermented Concord juice of the Welch's type, which is what gives the drink its color and its slight tannic edge. White grape juice will taste correct but look wrong.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, unsweetened and unflavored. Club soda or seltzer; tonic will fight the lime and the syrups.
- The glassFountain glasses of the period varied in size; a tall one of 10 to 12 ounces suits this. Two thirds full of cracked ice leaves room for roughly 6 ounces of soda over the 2 ounces or so of syrup and juice.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice chills fast and lets the soda foam up through it as it is poured, which is how the drink mixes itself. Whole cubes leave the syrup sitting on the bottom.
- YieldOne glass. Sweetness is high by current taste; half the vanilla syrup makes the lime read more clearly.
This book belongs to the brief, busy genre of non-alcoholic drink manuals that appeared as national Prohibition came into view in the late 1910s. Much of the material in such books came from the soda-fountain trade, which by then was a substantial American industry with its own supply chain of flavoring syrups, and which stood ready to absorb the custom that saloons were about to lose. Grape juice carried a particular charge in these years, as unfermented juice had long been promoted by temperance advocates as the respectable alternative to wine, and Concord juice pasteurized for the purpose was widely available in bottles. The combination here, sweet fruit syrups sharpened with fresh lime and lengthened with soda, is the same architecture as a mixed drink with the spirit taken out.