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Raspberry Favorite
Take the juice of one orange, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, one tablespoonful of raspberry syrup, and one tablespoonful of grape juice. Sweeten with one tablespoonful of powdered sugar. Mix well. Put into a glass half full of cracked ice and fill up with soda water.
A soda-fountain drink built in the glass, with no shaking and no straining. The only things that need translating are the raspberry syrup and the soda water.
- Raspberry syrupNot raspberry-flavored pancake syrup and not seedless jam thinned out. Period fountain syrup was a heavy sugar syrup carrying fruit juice, though the proportions varied from book to book. Bottled Italian-style raspberry sirop or a homemade batch of crushed berries cooked with sugar and strained both work.
- Grape juiceIn temperance books of this kind this means unfermented bottled grape juice, commonly Concord: dark purple and quite sweet. Use Concord rather than white grape if you want the original color, which is much of the drink's appeal.
- Powdered sugarPeriod "powdered" sugar meant sugar ground finer than granulated, not necessarily the same thing as modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar, and its weight per spoonful would have differed. Modern confectioners' sugar dissolves readily in cold liquid, and a tablespoon of it adds less sugar than a tablespoon of granulated.
- Sweeten to tasteWith syrup, grape juice and orange all contributing sugar, the full tablespoon may be too much. Mix the base first, taste, then add sugar.
- Mix before the iceCombine the juices, syrup and sugar in a separate glass or shaker tin and stir until the sugar has gone, then pour over the cracked ice. Sugar added on top of ice sits in the bottom in a gritty layer.
- Cracked iceCracked, not cubed and not crushed: irregular pieces roughly walnut-sized. Crushed ice melts fast and waters the drink down before it is finished.
- Soda waterPlain unflavored carbonated water, well chilled. Club soda or seltzer is right; tonic water, with its own sugar and quinine, is not. Add it slowly down the side of the glass and give one gentle lift with a spoon rather than stirring.
- YieldOne glass; the recipe does not state a size, only that it be half filled with cracked ice and topped with soda. Scale directly for more; the proportions hold.
Books like this one belong to a familiar type of temperance collection, offering a repertoire of drinks that looked and behaved like cocktails without alcohol. The soda fountain supplied the model: a rack of fruit syrups, a carbonation tap, and a house style of building drinks directly in the glass over cracked ice. Recipes of this kind lean on grape juice and fruit syrups partly for flavor and partly for color. Unfermented grape juice had a particular place in the temperance movement's affections, having been promoted since the nineteenth century as the respectable alternative to wine, and it turns up throughout collections like this one as a base for punches and fountain drinks alike.