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Anna's Dream
Juice of 1 lemon, 2 tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, ½ ounce grape juice, ½ ounce claret wine, small scoop shaved ice, fill glass with plain water, shake, put in 12-ounce lemonade glass, finish with a slice of orange and a cherry. Serve with spoon and straws.
A fountain lemonade with a wine float's worth of colour and not much else in the way of alcohol. It assembles in about a minute once the syrup question is settled.
- The measuresHalf an ounce is one tablespoon, so the grape juice and claret together add up to two tablespoons in a 12-ounce glass. The juice of one lemon is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons depending on the fruit.
- Powdered sugarAt a soda fountain of this period "powdered" usually meant finely milled granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Either dissolves if you shake hard, and simple syrup in place of the 2 tablespoons gives a cleaner result -- but 1 ounce of 1:1 syrup is well short of the sweetness of 2 tablespoons of sugar.
- ClaretClaret meant dry red Bordeaux, or in American practice any dry red in that style. A young, unoaked red works best here; anything jammy or heavily oaked fights the lemon.
- Grape juiceConcord was the dominant American commercial grape juice of the period, so an unsweetened Concord is the sensible reading here. Sweetened juice will push the drink over the edge with the sugar already in it.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely cracked ice both chills and dilutes quickly, which the recipe counts on. Cubes in a shaker will overchill without diluting enough, leaving the drink sharp.
- The order of operationsThe instruction to fill the glass with water, shake, and then pour into the 12-ounce glass means the drink is built and shaken in a mixing vessel, not in the serving glass. Shake briefly, five seconds, or the shaved ice waters it down.
- YieldOne 12-ounce glass. The alcohol works out to well under half a standard drink.
Named fountain drinks like this one belong to the era when the American drugstore soda counter was competing directly with the saloon, and the dispenser was expected to have a repertoire of "fancy drinks" with girls' names on them. The claret lemonade was a standard of the type: a long, iced, sweet-tart drink carrying just enough wine to give it colour and a faint vinous edge, served with a spoon and straws so the fruit could be eaten. Grape juice belongs to the same moment. Commercially pasteurized unfermented grape juice had been promoted since the late nineteenth century as a temperance alternative to wine, and by the 1900s it was a fountain staple, which is why it sits here alongside the claret rather than in place of it. Recipes of this sort largely vanished from soda books after national Prohibition took effect in 1920, when even half an ounce of wine put the dispenser on the wrong side of the law.