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Grape Squeeze or Grape Lemonade
Grape Juice, 1 quart; Syrup, 3 quarts.
Use 1 ounce of the above syrup to an 8-ounce glass. Cut a lemon in four parts if small, or eight parts if large, squeeze the juice from one part into the glass, and throw in the peel. Fill the glass with soda water, stir with spoon and serve with straws.
A soda fountain formula rather than a single drink: you make a bulk grape syrup, then build each glass to order. The proportions look odd until you realise the "syrup" is fountain stock syrup, not flavouring.
- What "syrup" means hereIn fountain work, plain syrup is a heavy sugar solution; manuals of the period generally call for something on the order of 6 to 7 lb of sugar per gallon of finished syrup, though formulas vary and both hot and cold methods were used. Substituting a 1:1 simple syrup will give a thin, sour drink; go closer to 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight.
- The bulk mixOne quart grape juice to three quarts syrup gives a gallon of finished grape syrup. At 1 ounce per glass, that is roughly 128 drinks, so scale down hard for home use: 1/2 cup grape juice to 1 1/2 cups syrup makes about sixteen glasses at the recipe's 1 ounce each.
- Grape juiceAlmost certainly unfermented bottled juice, and most likely of the Concord type then dominant: sweet and strongly foxy in flavour. Modern white grape or blended juices will not read as "grape" against carbonated water; use a Concord juice with no added sugar so the syrup ratio still balances.
- Soda waterFountain soda was charged far harder than most bottled sparkling water. Use the coldest, most aggressively carbonated water you can get, and pour it down the side of the glass onto the syrup rather than over ice.
- The lemon quarterThis is the hinge of the drink. Squeezing a wedge and dropping the spent peel in adds oil from the rind as well as juice, which is what separates a grape squeeze from plain grape soda. Roll and press the peel against the glass before dropping it in.
- Glass sizeAn 8-ounce fountain glass is small by current standards. With ice it holds perhaps 6 ounces of liquid, so 1 ounce of syrup is about a 1:6 dilution; in a modern 16-ounce tumbler you will want closer to 2 ounces.
- Keeping the syrupA sugar-heavy syrup cut with fruit juice will hold a week or two refrigerated, but the juice makes it far more perishable than plain stock syrup. Mix only what you will drink and keep it cold.
Bottled unfermented grape juice was a relatively new commercial product when fountain manuals like this one were written; its production is generally traced to Thomas Welch, a New Jersey dentist and Methodist who pasteurised grape juice in the late 1860s as an alcohol-free communion wine, and it reached a mass market around the turn of the century. That temperance pedigree is exactly why it turns up at the soda fountain, which sold itself as the respectable alternative to the saloon.