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Turkish Grape Punch
Four ounces grape juice, 1 dash angostura bitters, 10-ounce bell glass half full shaved ice. Cover ice with ice cream. Top off with crushed fruit. Serve straw and spoon.
A soda-fountain drink rather than a cocktail: unfermented grape juice, a dash of bitters and ice cream, built in the glass and eaten as much as drunk. The proportions are given in fountain shorthand, so a little translation helps.
- The bell glassA 10-ounce bell glass is the flared, footed soda glass of the period; any 10 to 12 oz tulip or sundae glass works. "Half full shaved ice" means the ice fills the lower half of the glass before anything else goes in.
- Shaved ice, not cubesFountains shaved ice fine so the syrup and juice would soak through it and it would yield to a spoon. Cubes leave the grape juice sitting in a layer at the bottom; crush or shave the ice, or use a snow-cone attachment.
- Grape juiceFour ounces is half a cup. Fountain grape juice of the period was generally Concord-style and dark, and was often kept sweetened as a syrup; unsweetened modern white grape juice will taste thin here. Concord or a dark purple juice is closer to the intent.
- AngosturaOne dash is the whole point of the bitters, and more will dominate the fruit. Angostura is still made and needs no substitution.
- "Cover ice with ice cream"Roughly one generous scoop of plain vanilla, laid over the packed ice so it floats above the juice rather than being stirred in. A simple vanilla with low overrun sits better here than an airy one.
- Crushed fruitAt a fountain this meant the jar of sweetened crushed fruit kept for sundaes, usually pineapple, strawberry or cherry, not fresh chopped fruit. Mash fruit with a little sugar and let it stand until it gives up syrup, or use a thick fruit preserve loosened with a spoonful of water.
- Yield and servingOne glass. It is assembled and served immediately, with both a straw and a long spoon; nothing is shaken or stirred, and the drink is meant to be drunk from the bottom while the ice cream is spooned from the top.
- Why "Turkish"Nothing in the build requires it. The name seems to promise something aromatic, which here is carried entirely by the single dash of bitters.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one multiplied in the United States in the decades around 1900, when the drugstore fountain was a serious commercial rival to the saloon and needed a repertoire of its own. Grape juice was central to that repertoire: pasteurized, unfermented juice had become a reliable commercial product in the later nineteenth century and was marketed hard as a temperance alternative to wine, which made it a natural base for drinks given borrowed, faintly exotic cocktail names. "Turkish" here belongs to the same fashion that produced Turkish coffee, Turkish delight and Turkish baths in Anglo-American advertising of the period, where the label promised something aromatic and mildly exotic rather than anything traceable to Turkey. The addition of Angostura bitters, an ingredient with an unambiguously bar-room pedigree, and the finish of ice cream and crushed fruit show what the fountain was doing: it dressed a bar drink in a sundae's clothing so it could be sold across the counter to anyone.