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Grape Fruit Cobble
Juice of ½ lemon or lime; Kitro syrup, 2 ounces; fill glass nearly full cracked ice; angostura bitters, 1 dash; sherry wine, ½ ounce. Shake, pour in fancy cobble glass, and dress with slice of orange.
A fountain cobbler is a shaken drink poured unstrained over its own ice, so the proportions matter more than technique. Two points need translating before you build it.
- Kitro syrupEvidently a proprietary fountain syrup rather than a generic citrus one; the drink's title points to a grapefruit flavour, since no grapefruit is otherwise listed among the ingredients. A grapefruit syrup, or 2 ounces of simple syrup cut about half-and-half with fresh grapefruit juice, gives the intended effect.
- Ounces mean fluid ouncesFountain manuals measured syrup by volume from a graduated pump or ladle. Two ounces is a quarter cup, which reads as very sweet by modern standards; an ounce and a half is closer to current taste, especially if your syrup is not diluted with juice.
- The sherry is real wineHalf an ounce of sherry in a soda fountain drink was not unusual before Prohibition; some fountains and drugstores were licensed to sell wines and cordials. A dry or medium amontillado suits the grapefruit better than a cream sherry.
- Cracked, not cubedCracked ice is the point of a cobbler: it chills and dilutes fast, and the glass is filled with it before shaking. Whack cubes in a towel with a rolling pin, or use a Lewis bag.
- Do not strainShake and pour the whole contents, ice included, into the serving glass. Straining leaves a thin, oversweet drink with nothing to hold the fruit garnish up.
- The fancy cobble glassA footed goblet, wider at the mouth than a soda glass; the recipe gives no capacity. Any stemmed glass of similar size works, and cobblers were commonly served with a straw.
- YieldOne drink.
The cobbler is one of the oldest American mixed drinks still recognizable, generally traced to the 1830s, when cheap harvested ice made a glass packed with crushed ice a novelty worth paying for; the sherry cobbler became the standard against which the others were measured, and it is often credited with popularizing the drinking straw. By the time books like this one were written for soda fountain operators, the cobbler had migrated from the bar to the fountain counter, where a dispenser licensed to sell wine could pour half an ounce of sherry into a glass otherwise built from flavored syrups, ice and fruit. The grapefruit version reflects a newer taste: grapefruit was still a somewhat fashionable fruit in the United States around the turn of the century, and syrup houses sold flavors of this kind under proprietary names, of which Kitro appears to be one.