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Punchine
Cracked ice, ½ tumblerful; juice of ½ orange; lemon juice, 1 dash; curacoa cordial, 1 dash; claret syrup, 1 ounce; Catawba syrup, 1 ounce; plain soda, 1 tumblerful. Stir, strain and serve.
A fountain punch built in the glass and strained off the ice. The measures are in soda-counter terms, and two of the three syrups no longer exist as commercial products.
- TumblerFountain tumblers of this period ran roughly 8 to 12 ounces, so half a tumbler of cracked ice is something over a cup and "plain soda, 1 tumblerful" is a tumbler of carbonated water. The drink is a single serving, and the instruction to strain implies it goes into another glass.
- A dashAt the fountain a dash was usually poured from a dash bottle, on the order of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon. It works as a seasoning here rather than a main ingredient.
- Claret syrupOften not wine at all: fountain claret syrup was commonly a sugar syrup coloured and flavoured to suggest red wine, with grape or raspberry and a little acid, though some formularies did use real claret. Substitute a tart red grape or raspberry syrup and expect a slightly sweeter drink.
- Catawba syrupCatawba is an American grape of largely labrusca parentage, with a pronounced musky, "foxy" flavour. Concord grape syrup is the nearest thing on a shelf today; unsweetened Concord juice reduced with sugar gets closer to the original's intensity.
- Curacoa cordialSpelled variously; in a soda book it may well mean a non-alcoholic orange cordial rather than the liqueur, though fountain manuals sometimes did call for the spirit. A dash of real curacao works and is closer to the flavour the name promises; at one dash the alcohol is negligible.
- Stir, strain and serveThe ice chills and slightly dilutes the syrups before it is strained out; serving without ice also keeps the drink from watering down as it stands.
- Order of buildingThe recipe's own order is ice, then juices and cordial, then the syrups, with soda last; pouring the soda down the side of the glass keeps more of the fizz.
- BalanceTwo ounces of syrup, in a drink whose soda alone is a tumblerful, is sweet by current taste. Half an orange's juice and the dash of lemon are what hold it together, so use fresh fruit and add more lemon rather than less syrup if it cloys.
Fountain "punches" like this one exist because the soda counter spent the late nineteenth century translating the bar list into syrups: a punch bowl's claret, citrus and orange cordial rendered in bottles a dispenser could reach without a liquor licence. The Catawba is the American note in it, a native grape long grown along the Ohio and in the Finger Lakes and best remembered through the sparkling Catawba wine made commercially in Cincinnati in the mid-1800s; by the time this book was printed the grape survived at the fountain mostly as a syrup and a bottled juice. The name Punchine looks like a coinage of the trade, one of the many invented drink names that fountain manuals used to give a house mixture something to be called on a wall card.