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Grape Cooler
One ounce grape juice, 11/ ½ ounces orange syrup, ½ ounce lemon syrup, ¼ teaspoonful acid phosphate solution, ¼ glass cracked ice. Mix in 14-ounce lemonade glass. Decorate with pineapple.
A fountain formula rather than a home recipe: it assumes a marble counter, a carbonator and a rack of bottled syrups. Everything needed to reproduce it is available, but a few conventions have to be filled in.
- The missing ingredientThe text never mentions carbonated water, yet three ounces of syrup and juice will not fill a fourteen-ounce glass, so a fill of soda water is almost certainly assumed. Build the syrups, juice and phosphate over the ice, then fill the glass with cold soda water and stir once with a long spoon.
- That garbled measurement"11/ ½ ounces" is a typesetting casualty. Read it as 1½ ounces of orange syrup, which balances the ½ ounce of lemon and gives the drink its body.
- Acid phosphateA solution of phosphoric acid with calcium, magnesium and potassium salts, sold by drug supply houses and still made for the cocktail trade. It supplies a dry, mineral tartness that citrus juice does not; a quarter teaspoon is what the recipe calls for, and much more will push the drink towards a harsh, metallic sourness.
- Fountain syrupsOrange and lemon syrup were sugar syrups flavoured with juice and oil of the peel, and much sweeter than juice alone. A homemade equivalent is a heavy sugar syrup with zest and strained juice; do not substitute plain juice or the cooler will be thin and sour.
- Grape juiceIn fountain use this meant unfermented Concord juice, deep purple and strongly musky, of which the Welch product was the best-known commercial example. Modern white grape juice will not give the colour or the flavour the recipe is aiming at.
- The glassA 14-ounce lemonade glass is a tall straight tumbler, larger than most modern water glasses. Use anything of 14 to 16 ounces; a quarter glass of cracked ice is about three and a half ounces, a little under half a cup.
- IceCracked ice, not cubes and not crushed. The distinction was a real one at the fountain; crushed ice melts fastest and thins the drink.
- Decoration and yieldOne drink. A spear or wedge of pineapple on the rim, cut thick enough to sit on the glass; canned pineapple in juice, drained, works as well as fresh.
Soda fountains of this period ran on a small library of bottled syrups and a bank of "phosphates" — drinks acidulated with acid phosphate, which had arrived in American pharmacies in the later nineteenth century as both a flavouring and a supposed tonic for nervous exhaustion. The dispenser was a druggist as much as a bartender, and books like this one were trade manuals, giving him a repertoire he could assemble in seconds from what was already on the counter. A "cooler" was loosely the tall category — period usage varied — generally meaning more ice and more soda than a phosphate served in a small glass, garnished with fruit and sold in summer. The prominence of unfermented grape juice is worth noting; it was promoted heavily by temperance-minded producers as the respectable alternative to wine, and the fountain was where that argument was made in commercial form.