Home › At the Fountain › Grape Fosa
Grape Fosa
Grape Fosa has met with the approbation of all to whom it has been introduced. Its exquisite flavor is that of the most fragrant grapes, and the American concentration is peculiarly one that affords a Grape Fosa drink that is simply fetching. Grape Juice, 1 pint; Syrup, 1 quart.
Mix well. Draw 7 ounces of soda water into an 8-ounce mineral glass, add 1 ounce of the above mixture and serve. Chairs are a good thing; when resting, customers drink slowly. This means looking about seeing other things to buy.
A fountain formula rather than a household one: you build a bulk syrup, then dispense it one ounce at a time. The proportions are the whole recipe, so measure them rather than eyeballing.
- "Syrup" means fountain simple syrupNot maple, not corn syrup. Soda fountains worked from a heavy sugar syrup, cooked just enough to dissolve and then cooled; published formulas vary, running from roughly equal weights of sugar and water up to about two parts sugar to one. A thinner syrup will give a noticeably weaker, less clinging drink at these dilutions.
- Volumes1 pint grape juice plus 1 quart syrup is 16 oz to 32 oz, a 1:2 ratio, yielding 48 oz of finished mixture. At 1 oz per glass that is about 48 drinks, so scale down freely: 2 oz grape juice to 4 oz syrup makes six.
- The grape juice"The American concentration" points to native Concord-type juice (Vitis labrusca), which carries that musky, deliberately grapey aroma. Buy unsweetened 100% Concord juice; a sweetened juice drink plus a quart of syrup will be cloying.
- The ratio at the glass7 oz soda water to 1 oz syrup mixture is a 7:1 dilution, lighter than many modern homemade sodas. If it tastes thin, the likeliest cause is a weak syrup rather than the proportion.
- Getting the carbonation rightFountain men drew a coarse heavy stream first to mix, then finished with a fine stream. At home, put the ounce of syrup in the glass, add well-chilled soda water slowly down the side, and stir once at most. Warm soda water and vigorous stirring both flatten it immediately.
- Keeping the mixtureDiluting the syrup with a pint of juice lowers the sugar concentration enough that it is no longer shelf-stable at room temperature. Refrigerate it, keep it covered, and discard it if it smells yeasty or fizzes on its own.
- ServingAn 8-ounce "mineral glass" is a straight-sided soda glass; any 8 to 10 oz tumbler works. Serve without ice, as written, if the soda water is cold; ice will dilute a drink already built at 7:1.
Grape juice was a comparatively new fountain flavor when books like this were being written. Unfermented bottled grape juice is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist in Vineland, New Jersey, who began pasteurizing Concord juice in 1869 as a communion wine that broke no temperance pledge; it was his son's marketing decades later that pushed it into groceries and soda fountains, where it arrived with a useful reputation as both wholesome and faintly celebratory. The "American" grape flavor being praised here is the Concord and its labrusca relatives, whose foxy perfume was considered coarse next to European wine grapes but which made an unmistakable syrup. The name "Fosa" is not explained in the book and belongs to the era's habit of coining proprietary-sounding fountain names. The closing note about chairs is not incidental: by 1900 the fountain was the front of a drugstore, and a customer sitting down was a customer with time to notice the merchandise.