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Grape Juice-Ade
One ounce lemon syrup, 1 ounce grape juice in mineral glass, fill up with soda, stir well and serve.
A two-syrup fountain drink that takes about a minute to build. The only real obstacles are the vessel and the syrups, both of which meant something specific behind a soda counter.
- The mineral glassFountain glasses of this sort generally held somewhere in the range of 8 to 12 ounces. Any tall 8-ounce tumbler works; a larger glass just dilutes the drink.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesBoth syrup measures are liquid, poured from a fountain measure or ladle. Two tablespoons is one fluid ounce.
- Lemon syrupFountain lemon syrup was a heavy sweet syrup, typically well over one part sugar to one part water, flavoured with lemon. Bottled lemon cordial or a homemade lemon simple syrup stands in; commercial lemonade concentrate is far weaker and will read thin.
- Grape juice means unfermentedIn the soda-fountain era this was pasteurised Concord juice, deep purple and sweet-tart. Concord juice is still the closest match; a dry varietal grape juice will taste flat against the lemon.
- "Soda" is carbonated waterPlain seltzer, not sweetened lemon-lime soda. Fountains drew it under pressure through a coarse stream, which mixed the syrups on the way in.
- Stir with restraintStir -- Two or three passes with a long spoon are enough to bring the syrup up off the bottom.
- Yield and servingOne glass. Serve over ice if the seltzer is not thoroughly chilled; fountains chilled their water, so ice was not always used.
Grape juice arrived at the soda fountain as a temperance product. Unfermented bottled grape juice was commercialised in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, promoted first for communion use and then as a wholesome alternative to wine, and by the 1900s it was a standard fountain stock item alongside lemon, orange and raspberry syrups. The "-ade" suffix borrowed from lemonade is often taken to have signalled to customers what they were getting: a fruit syrup lengthened with water, here charged rather than still. Drinks like this one are the reason American fountain manuals of the period run to hundreds of entries; a handful of syrups, combined two or three at a time and topped with soda, generated an apparently endless menu from a small inventory.