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Grape Juice Float
Make a plain lemonade; then fill the glass within one inch of the top and hold a teaspoon in the center of the glass, pouring grape juice slowly until the glass is full.
A two-part fountain drink that depends entirely on layering: sweetened lemonade below, grape juice floated on top. The original assumes you already know the counterman's plain lemonade, so that is the part worth spelling out.
- Plain lemonade at the fountainFountain manuals of the period give plain lemonade as roughly the juice of a lemon with simple syrup and cold or carbonated water to fill, stirred over ice; proportions vary from book to book. Something near 3/4 oz lemon juice and 1 oz syrup in a 10 oz glass is a workable starting point.
- Glass sizeSoda-fountain glasses of the period commonly ran somewhere around 8 to 12 oz. 'Within one inch of the top' leaves whatever that inch holds in your glass -- on the order of a couple of ounces -- for the grape juice.
- Which grape juiceMost likely the deep purple bottled pasteurised Concord juice that became widely available from the 1890s onward, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond 'grape juice'. Modern blends and white grape juice will not give the colour contrast.
- IceThe recipe does not mention ice. If you use it, put it in before the lemonade; dropping ice in afterwards will disturb the layer.
- ServingServe at once, unstirred, so the layers stay distinct. Makes one glass.
Grape juice as a bottled, shelf-stable drink is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist who pasteurised Concord grape juice in the 1860s as an unfermented communion wine; by the turn of the century it had become a standard fountain syrup line rather than a church supply. Drinks like this one belong to the soda fountain's temperance side of the family: they gave the drugstore counter a repertoire of showy, non-alcoholic glasses to sell alongside the ice-cream sodas. The float itself is pure counter theatre, a trick of specific gravity that costs nothing and makes an ordinary lemonade worth pointing at.