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Grape Ice
One pint grape juice, 8 ounces water, 1 pint rock candy syrup, grated peel of 1 orange, juice of 4 lemons. Mix and strain. Freeze in
A fountain water ice rather than a cream ice, and the original text breaks off mid-instruction at "Freeze in" — the missing words are the standard fountain direction to freeze in an ice-cream freezer. Everything else you need is here.
- Rock candy syrupFountain rock candy syrup was a heavy, very clear sugar syrup, much denser than ordinary simple syrup and close to saturation (on the order of 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, cooled). Ordinary 1:1 simple syrup will leave the ice noticeably lean and hard, so make it heavy.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessIn a water ice the syrup is what keeps the texture scoopable. Cutting it back to modern sweetness levels turns this into a solid purple block. If you want it less sweet, accept that it will freeze harder and plan to temper it before serving.
- Grape juiceUnsweetened Concord juice is the likeliest match for the bottled juice of the period — dark, musky, fairly acidic. Bottled "grape drink" and sweetened cocktails already carry sugar and will throw the formula off.
- MeasuresA pint is 16 fl oz; the 8 ounces of water is fluid ounces, so the total liquid is 2 1/2 pints plus the lemon juice. Four lemons give roughly 1/2 cup of juice.
- The orange peelGrate only the coloured zest. Letting the zest sit in the mixed liquid for a short while before straining will draw out more flavour, though the text says only to mix and strain; strain through fine mesh so no zest ends up in the frozen ice.
- FreezingChurn in an ice cream machine until it holds soft ridges, then firm in the freezer an hour or two. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita-style texture; a still-frozen block with no agitation will be coarse and icy.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, enough for eight to ten fountain-size portions. At the counter a water ice like this would typically have gone into a stemmed glass, or as a scoop in soda water.
Water ices like this one were fountain staples, not dessert-table dishes: the soda clerk kept them in the ice cream cabinet and sold them by the glass, sometimes drowned in carbonated water — a treatment often described as a "frappe" or float. The recipe leans on unfermented grape juice, usually the commercially bottled kind though it could also be pressed and bottled at home, a product generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a dentist and Methodist in Vineland, New Jersey, who pasteurized grape juice in 1869 to supply churches with a non-alcoholic communion wine; by the time books like this were being written for druggists, Concord juice was a cheap, year-round, shelf-stable flavour base. Rock candy syrup, called for here instead of plain sugar syrup, was said to be prized at the fountain for its brilliance and lack of off-flavour — clarity mattered when the drink was built in a glass in front of the customer.