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Midsummer Cheer
Put two tablespoonfuls of lemon syrup, and two tablespoonfuls of grape juice into a glass with a large spoonful of orange water ice. Shake well, and fill up with soda water. Garnish with a slice of lemon or orange.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a household one: it assumes a bar with syrups, ices and a charged-water tap on hand. Everything in it can be assembled at home once you know what the three fountain components were.
- Lemon syrupNot lemon extract or cordial concentrate but a fountain syrup: sugar and water boiled together and flavoured with lemon. Period formulas vary, generally running sweeter than a plain 1:1 syrup, and some used citric acid and extract rather than fresh fruit. Bottled lemonade syrup works; sweetened lemon squash is close enough.
- Orange water iceA water ice is a sugar-syrup-and-juice sorbet, no dairy at all. A large spoonful means a rounded serving-spoon scoop, and a good orange sorbet is the modern stand-in; orange sherbet will make the drink milky and much sweeter.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water from a siphon, unsweetened and unflavoured. Club soda or seltzer is the same thing; tonic water is not, since its quinine and sugar will fight the grape.
- Grape juiceAmerican grape juice of the period was usually unfermented Concord, dark and less bland than modern bottlings. Modern white grape juice gives a much flatter drink; a Concord or purple grape juice is truer to the original.
- How to shake itShake the syrup, juice and water ice together first, before any soda goes in. Carbonated water in a sealed shaker will foam over; the soda is poured in last, down the side of the glass, and only stirred once if at all.
- Glass and yieldOne drink. The recipe does not specify a glass; a fountain tumbler of roughly 8 to 12 ounces suits it, leaving room for several ounces of soda once the two ounces of syrup and juice and the scoop of ice are in.
- SweetnessTwo tablespoons of syrup plus sorbet is sweet by current taste. Cutting the lemon syrup to one tablespoon and adding a squeeze of fresh lemon juice keeps the balance without changing the character of the drink.
Books of this kind belong to a very specific moment in American drinking: the years when the temperance movement was gaining ground and the soda fountain, not the saloon, was where a town went for a cold glass of something. Grape juice had a particular place in that argument, being the respectable, unfermented alternative to wine; it is often noted that William Jennings Bryan, as Secretary of State in 1913, served grape juice instead of wine at an official dinner and was mocked for it for years afterward. The recipe's structure — syrup, fruit juice, a scoop of water ice, charged water — is straight from the professional fountain manual, where drinks were built to a formula so that any clerk could turn them out identically all afternoon.