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Grape Juice Frappe
Dissolve ¼ ounce gelatin and ¾ pound granulated sugar in i quart hot water. Allow to cool, add ½ pint of grape juice and freeze.
A soda-fountain frappe is a soft, spoonable ice rather than a firm sorbet, and the small dose of gelatin is what keeps it slushy instead of letting it set into a solid block. The proportions here are sound; only the equipment and a couple of the printed figures need translation.
- "i quart" is 1 quartThe lowercase i is a typesetting slip for the numeral 1. Read it as 1 quart (4 cups) of hot water.
- The gelatin is the hingeA quarter ounce is roughly one envelope of modern powdered gelatin (about 2¼ teaspoons). Bloom it in a little cold water first, then dissolve in the hot syrup; dumped dry into hot liquid it will clump and you will strain out half of it.
- Sugar by weightThree-quarters of a pound of granulated sugar is 12 ounces, or about 1¾ cups. That works out near 22 percent sugar by weight in the finished mix, which is what keeps a frappe scoopable straight from the freezer.
- Cool it fully before adding the juiceGrape juice loses its fresh aroma in hot syrup, and warm mix churns badly. Chill the syrup to refrigerator temperature, then stir in the juice.
- Grape juice then and nowThe fountain trade generally meant unfermented bottled Concord juice, sweet and strongly aromatic. Modern Concord juice is comparable; white grape juice will give a much blander, paler result.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerThe original assumed a hand-cranked ice-and-salt machine, which churns air in as it freezes. An ice cream maker does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes until it is granular.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts of finished frappe, enough for eight to ten fountain glasses of roughly 5 ounces each.
- ServingServe heaped in a stemmed glass, soft enough to take a straw and a spoon. If it has hardened in a deep freezer, let it temper 10 minutes before scooping.
Soda-fountain manuals of the early twentieth century treated frappes as a middle ground between a plain ice and a drink: sweeter and looser than a water ice, sold by the glass rather than the dish, and eaten with a spoon or drawn through a straw. Grape juice was one of the fountain's workhorse flavors in this period, thanks in large part to the commercial success of pasteurized unfermented grape juice, which was marketed heavily to temperance households and to churches for communion use and so carried no saloon associations at all. The gelatin here is a dispenser's trick rather than a cook's: a small amount of it holds water in suspension so the ice stays fine-grained and does not weep in the glass, the same reasoning behind the gum tragacanth and gelatin "bodies" that appear throughout these trade books.