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Claret Glace
Fill a champagne glass with finely shaved ice. Pour an ounce of American Claret Syrup over the ice, and garnish with a thin slice of lemon.
A fountain glacé is essentially shaved ice with syrup — the ancestor of the snow cone — and the whole thing rests on the texture of the ice and the quality of the syrup.
- Claret syrup is not wineClaret syrup may or may not be wine -- fountain formularies of the period give both: syrups made with actual claret ("American claret" being a common name for domestic red wine) and imitation versions, sweetened, acidulated and colored to suggest claret on a grape or fruit-acid base. Which one is meant here the recipe does not say. A dry-tart grape or black currant syrup gives the same effect.
- Shaved, not crushed"Finely shaved" means snow-fine ice that packs and holds syrup in suspension. Crushed or cracked ice lets the syrup drain straight to the bottom and leaves you with sweet liquid under dry ice. A shaved-ice machine or a food processor run in short pulses will do it.
- An ounce is an ounceTwo tablespoons of syrup, poured slowly so it saturates the mound rather than cutting a channel through it. Fountain syrups were heavily sweetened, so a single ounce carries a great deal of sugar.
- The glassA period champagne glass is a stemmed, wide-mouthed glass rather than the modern flute; fountain glassware sold under that name came in several shapes and sizes. Any wide, stemmed glass of roughly 6 ounces works; heap the ice above the rim.
- Serve it at onceShaved ice in a thin glass collapses within a few minutes. Build it to order and send it out with a long spoon or a spoon-straw — this is eaten as much as drunk.
- YieldOne glass, one serving.
The glacé occupies a small corner of the American soda fountain repertoire: no soda water, no cream, just shaved ice and syrup, sold in the hottest months when a customer wanted cold more than he wanted flavor. Wine-named syrups — claret, port, sherry, champagne — were a fixture of fountain catalogues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering the vocabulary of the bar to a trade that was often explicitly temperance-minded, and the practice long predates national Prohibition. The lemon slice here is doing the work of a wine garnish and also cutting the sugar, which is the same reason a bartender would have used it.