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Yale Sling
One-half ounce raspberry syrup, 1¼ ounces grape syrup, ½ ounce Catawba wine. Serve in 8-ounce mineral, with cracked ice.
A fountain sling of the type built on syrup rather than spirits, with just enough wine to justify the name. The whole thing takes under a minute once the syrups are to hand.
- "Serve in 8-ounce mineral"A "mineral" is the fountain glass used for charged-water drinks. The recipe never says to add soda, but 2¼ ounces of syrup and wine in an 8-ounce glass implies it, so carbonated water is almost certainly intended. Use a chilled 8-oz glass and top with plain seltzer, drawn from the side of the glass so the syrup lifts rather than foams over.
- Fountain ouncesFountain measures are fluid ounces: ½ oz is a tablespoon, 1¼ oz is 2½ tablespoons. Total flavoring is a little over 2 oz, leaving roughly 5 oz of soda and ice.
- Grape syrupPeriod grape syrup was a sweetened concentrate of Concord or Catawba juice, not the artificial grape flavor sold now. Reduce unsweetened Concord juice with sugar to a pourable syrup, or use a bar-quality grape syrup; imitation flavoring will overwhelm the wine.
- Catawba wineCatawba is an American grape (a labrusca-derived hybrid) and its wine is pink, foxy and lightly sweet. It is still made in Ohio and New York; a dry white will not read the same, so if you cannot find Catawba a soft off-dry rosé is closer than anything dry.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice was standard at the fountain because it chills fast and packs without diluting to nothing. Crush cubes coarsely in a towel rather than using pebble or nugget ice, which waters the drink down before it is finished.
- Order of buildingThe recipe does not specify one; syrups and wine first, then ice, then soda, with a single stir from a long spoon, is the usual fountain sequence.
- Yield and alcoholOne glass. Half an ounce of table wine is a trace amount, but it is not zero, which is worth knowing if you are serving these to a room.
The soda fountain borrowed the word sling from the tavern, where it had long meant spirits, water and sugar; by the time this book was compiled the fountain had drained most of the spirit out and kept the shape, so a "sling" at the counter meant a tall iced glass of syrup and charged water with at most a splash of wine. Catawba, the grape here, is an American variety generally traced to the Carolinas and made famous in the Ohio Valley, where Nicholas Longworth's Cincinnati vineyards turned it into the best-known native wine of the mid-nineteenth century; it survived into the fountain era as a familiar, faintly musky flavor rather than a serious cellar wine. Naming drinks after colleges was a standard dispenser's habit of the period, alongside the Harvard, the Princeton and a long roster of local variations, and the name usually signaled nothing about the recipe beyond a bid for the collegiate trade.