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Champagne Velvet
One ounce crabapple syrup, 4 ounces orange cider, ½ ounce lime juice, dash of cream, ½ glass shaved ice. Use tall frappe glass and fill Royal Ruby champagne from bottle, using a champagne tap to draw. Sell for 15 cents. The Royal Ruby champagne is non-intoxicating made of 5 gallons expressed grape juice, 1 gallon pure apple cider, 1 ounce fruit acid, 8 pounds granulated sugar. Dissolve the sugar in the cider by stirring, cold, then mix with other ingredients and bottle by filling quart bottles three-fourths full and charging with gas by the aid of a bottling attachment. Bottle quickly and keep in a cool place. If you have bottling attachment, place in each bottle before pouring in the liquid 6 or 8 grains bitartrate of potassa. Cork quickly.
Two recipes are stacked here: a fountain drink assembled to order, and the bottled "Royal Ruby champagne" that tops it. The bottling half is the problem, and it is the part that cannot be reproduced as written.
- Why the bottling failsFive gallons of expressed grape juice plus a gallon of cider and eight pounds of sugar, corked cold in quart bottles, is a fermentation substrate with no heat step, no measured acidity and no sterilisation. Wild yeast in raw juice will restart in the bottle and build pressure well past what a corked quart will hold.
- Raw ciderUnpasteurized apple cider is a documented vehicle for E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium; that is why commercial cider carries a warning label or is pasteurized. Nothing in this procedure brings the juice to any temperature at all.
- What to use insteadFor the fountain drink, use a commercial carbonated sparkling grape juice or a grape shrub topped with soda water. If you want to bottle-carbonate at home, follow a current, tested procedure rather than this one.
- Fruit acidThe trade term covers citric or tartaric acid sold in bulk to fountains. Both are still available, but the single ounce specified here is a flavour adjustment, not a preservative dose, and should not be read as one.
- Bitartrate of potassaCream of tartar, still on the spice shelf. Six to eight grains is roughly 0.4-0.5 gram. The recipe does not say what it is for, and in any case it should not be read as a preservative.
- Crabapple and orange cider syrupsBoth turn up among fountain syrup names of the period. Crabapple syrup can be approximated with crabapple jelly thinned with hot water; "orange cider" is a fountain syrup name and not what a modern shopper would call cider.
- Glassware and iceFrappe glasses varied in capacity, so "half a glass" of shaved ice is only loosely specified. Shaved ice, not cubes: it chills fast and holds the syrups in suspension.
- The champagne tapA hand tap driven into the cork let a fountain draw a few ounces and keep the rest of the bottle under pressure. Modern equivalents are champagne stoppers or a keg system; a partly poured bottle otherwise goes flat within a day.
Soda-fountain manuals of the early twentieth century are full of "non-intoxicating" wines and champagnes, and the reason is commercial rather than culinary: local option laws, county-level prohibition and the temperance movement had created a large market for drinks that looked and were served like wine but were sold across a marble counter. The elaborate staging matters as much as the flavour here, with the bottle, the cork, the champagne tap and the ruby colour all borrowed from the bar. Fountain operators were also expected to be manufacturers, compounding their own syrups and charged bottlings in the back room, which is why a fifteen-cent drink recipe runs straight into a five-gallon batch formula. The name "velvet" is often said to have been applied to drinks softened with cream or a smooth syrup, though the derivation is uncertain; the dash of cream against grape and lime acid is what earns it here.