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Victory Grape
Add the juice of one lemon to six tablespoonfuls of grape juice. Break in an egg and add powdered sugar to sweeten. Shake well and strain into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice. Add soda water, using the syphon.
This is a temperance flip: a raw whole egg shaken with acid, sugar and grape juice, then lengthened with siphon soda. The egg is never heated at any point, which is what puts it out of bounds here.
- Raw egg, never cookedThe whole egg goes into the glass raw and stays raw; lemon juice and sugar do nothing to it. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella enterica, and neither shaking nor dilution with soda water reduces that risk. Any current drink recipe of this type calls for pasteurised shell eggs or carton egg product, and that is the version to look up rather than this one.
- Six tablespoonfulsSix tablespoons is 3 fl oz of grape juice, so the drink is mostly ice and soda. The proportions may read thin to modern eyes, though period grape juice was unsweetened.
- Grape juice of the periodThis would most likely have been bottled unfermented juice of the Concord type rather than the sweetened cocktail blends sold now. The recipe's added sugar is there to sweeten a drink that also contains the juice of a whole lemon.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" generally meant a finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in a modern box, though usage was not consistent.
- The syphonA charged soda siphon delivered carbonated water under pressure at the table. A bottle of seltzer or club soda is the direct equivalent.
- YieldOne tall glass, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz once the ice and soda are in.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the flood of dry-drink books that appeared as national Prohibition arrived. The flip — egg, sugar, acid, something long and cold — was one of the easiest transfers, since its body and foam came from the egg rather than from liquor; bartenders had been shaking eggs into drinks for generations. Grape juice was the emblematic temperance liquid of the period, promoted heavily as the respectable, unfermented alternative to wine, and it is often noted that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan's grape-juice diplomacy made it a byword for teetotal entertaining. The drink's name, "Victory," invites more than one reading in 1919, when the Allied victory in the war was as available a reference as the dry cause.