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Catawba Punch (One ounce lemon syrup juice)
One ounce lemon syrup, juice of 1½ lemon, 2 ounces Catawba wine, ¼ glass shaved ice. Mix in 14-ounce straight lemonade glass. Decorate with pineapple and cherries.
A soda-fountain punch, written in the shorthand a dispenser working behind a marble counter would have understood. The proportions are sound; what is missing is the step every fountain man took for granted.
- The missing finishRoughly five ounces of liquid go into a fourteen-ounce glass, so the glass is plainly meant to be topped up, most likely with carbonated water from the fountain, though the recipe does not say so. Without something to lengthen it you have a very sharp two-ounce wine sour.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sugar syrup flavored with lemon oil and a little citric acid, thicker and sweeter than anything sold as lemonade concentrate now. A rich simple syrup (2:1 sugar to water) with a strip of lemon zest steeped in it is the closest match; plain 1:1 syrup will leave the drink thin.
- Catawba wineA light, foxy-scented pink or white wine from the native Catawba grape, still made in Ohio, New York and Missouri. It is usually off-dry, so a dry white will shift the balance; if you substitute, a slightly sweet rosé is nearer the mark than a Sauvignon Blanc.
- OuncesAll ounces here are fluid ounces as measured in the shop, so one ounce of syrup and two of wine, poured with the standard fountain measure. The juice of a lemon and a half runs about two to two and a half tablespoons per lemon, so figure three to four tablespoons total.
- Shaved ice, not cubesA quarter glass of shaved or finely cracked ice chills and dilutes quickly, which the drink depends on. Cubes will leave it warm at the top and undiluted at the bottom; pulse ice in a food processor or crush it in a canvas bag.
- The glassA "straight lemonade glass" is a tall, untapered tumbler; here it holds fourteen ounces. Any highball or Collins glass of similar capacity works.
- Garnish and yieldPineapple at a fountain would generally have been canned rings or chunks in syrup, cut to straddle the rim, with a couple of cherries, maraschino by this date. Makes one drink; scale linearly and mix each glass separately rather than batching, since the ice does the diluting.
The Catawba grape was propagated commercially in the United States from the 1820s and became the backbone of the first successful American wine industry, centered on Nicholas Longworth's vineyards around Cincinnati, whose sparkling Catawba was famous enough by the 1850s for Longfellow to write an ode to it. By the time soda-fountain manuals like this one were compiled, Catawba survived mainly as a light, faintly musky table wine from Ohio, the Finger Lakes and Missouri, and it turns up constantly in fountain "punches" because its sweetness and low alcohol suited a drink that was mostly ice and carbonated water. Wine at the soda fountain is a useful reminder that the fountain's relationship to drink was more mixed than it later appeared: fountains were widely promoted as temperance alternatives to the saloon, yet druggists also dispensed wine, sherry and bitters alongside phosphates and egg creams, and Prohibition is often credited with finishing off recipes like this one and pushing the fountain permanently toward ice cream.