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Claret Cup Syrup
Claret Wine, 3 pints; Rhine Wine, 2 pints; Catawba Wine, 1 pint; Prune Juice, 10 pints. Add 14 pounds sugar, stir until it is all dissolved. To serve, draw 2 ounces in a mineral glass, a little shaved ice, fill with solid soda, stir and garnish with a slice of orange, a sprig of mint and a creme de menthe cherry.
A pre-Prohibition fountain syrup: wine and prune juice carried by a very heavy sugar load, then drawn two ounces at a time and lengthened with carbonated water. The proportions are trade-scale, so scale down before you start.
- YieldAs written this makes 16 pints of liquid plus 14 pounds of sugar, or roughly three gallons of finished syrup. At 2 ounces a drink that is close to 190 servings. Dividing by eight gives a manageable quart and a half.
- Sugar ratioFourteen pounds to 16 pints works out to a bit under half sugar by weight: a heavy syrup, though well short of saturation, and heavy enough with the wine to help it hold behind the counter. Stirring cold takes a long time; warming the prune juice gently helps, but do not heat the wine or you will boil off both alcohol and aroma.
- Catawba and Rhine wineCatawba is an American labrusca-derived hybrid, pink and foxy-sweet, still made in Ohio and the Finger Lakes but not common elsewhere. "Rhine wine" in 1900s American usage generally means a German-style white, often domestic; a Riesling or Silvaner stands in. Claret means Bordeaux-style red.
- Prune juiceThe bulk ingredient, and not a filler by accident: it gives body and a dark colour that reads as wine. Modern bottled prune juice may well be sweeter and thicker than what a fountain used, so taste before committing all 14 pounds of sugar.
- "Solid soda"Fountain shorthand for the fine, still stream from the carbonated-water tap rather than the coarse foaming one. Pour plain seltzer down the side of the glass; the point is to keep the drink clear and not foam it over the mint.
- Mineral glassA fountain glass, probably somewhere in the 8 to 12 ounce range; sizes varied. Two ounces of syrup in that volume is a dilution of roughly one to five.
- Crème de menthe cherryA cocktail cherry steeped in green crème de menthe, once a standard garnish jar. Green maraschino cherries are the nearest current equivalent.
- AlcoholThe syrup is roughly a third wine by volume before sugar, so a served glass carries a small but real amount of alcohol. It is not a soft drink, whatever the fountain setting suggests.
- KeepingThe sugar concentration is preservative, but refrigerate it anyway; the wine will oxidise and the fruit character flattens within a few weeks.
Claret cup began as a British summer punch — red wine, sugar, lemon, cucumber peel or borage, topped with soda water — and appears in English household books through the nineteenth century as a mild drink for warm-weather gatherings. American soda fountains, which by 1900 were commercial operations selling dozens of flavours by the ounce, took it up as a bottled syrup so that a single pull of the tap could reproduce a compounded drink. The wine list here is a snapshot of what a fountain man could buy domestically: claret for colour and tannin, a German-style white for acid, and Catawba, the native-grape wine that dominated Ohio River valley production in the mid-nineteenth century before vine disease and later Prohibition dismantled the trade. The prune juice base, ten pints against six of wine, is the frank economy of the fountain — cheap dark fruit doing most of the work while the wines supply the name.