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Catawba Cobbler
Fill 12-ounce glass ⅓ full of fine ice, 1 ounce lemon syrup, 1 ounce grape juice, fill glass with solid soda, serve with straws; top with slice of orange.
A soda-fountain drink built in the glass, and one of the easier fountain formulas to reproduce at home once the trade vocabulary is decoded.
- "Solid soda"Fountain draft arms had two streams: a fine spray that whipped foam into a drink, and a solid stream of plain carbonated water. "Fill with solid soda" means top up with seltzer without frothing it. Pour down the side of the glass against the ice.
- Lemon syrupNot lemon juice. Fountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with lemon and sharpened with citric acid, roughly 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. Substitute a strong homemade lemon simple syrup, or use 1 oz simple syrup with a scant teaspoon of lemon juice.
- Catawba grape juiceCatawba is a pink American grape, not the dark Concord that dominates supermarket grape juice. Concord will work but gives a much darker, jammier drink; unfermented Catawba juice is still sold by some Finger Lakes and Ohio producers if you want the original pale rose color.
- Fine iceShaved or crushed ice, not cubes, filling one third of the glass. It chills fast and packs tightly; the recipe has it served with straws.
- Glass sizeA 12-ounce fountain glass. Ice takes about 4 ounces of the volume, the syrups 2, so you need roughly 6 ounces of soda water. Scale down proportionally for a smaller glass rather than cutting the syrup.
- YieldOne tall drink. Add the orange slice last; avoid stirring after topping, which drives off the carbonation.
The cobbler began as an alcoholic drink: the sherry cobbler of the 1830s, sugar and citrus and shaved ice in a tall glass, is often credited as the drink that popularised drinking through a straw in America and was one of the most famous exports of the antebellum bar. Soda fountains took the form and dropped the wine, keeping the ice, the fruit garnish and the straws, so that a "cobbler" at the fountain meant a fruit-syrup-and-soda build rather than anything fermented. The Catawba name points to the grape Major John Adlum propagated near Washington in the early nineteenth century and Nicholas Longworth made into a celebrated sparkling wine in Cincinnati; by the time this book was printed, Catawba was also familiar as unfermented juice, marketed by the temperance trade as a respectable substitute for wine. A drink like this one sits on that seam, borrowing the vocabulary and the garnish of the bar for a glass that could be served to anyone.