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Grape Punch
1 cup grapefruit juice
1 pint water
1 small piece of ginger root 1 quart bottle grape juice
Sweeten to taste
Combine ingredients; chill and remove the ginger root before serving. Serve in glasses with cracked ice.
A straightforward non-alcoholic punch from the era when bottled grape juice was a fashionable temperance drink. Two things need attention: the ginger root has no stated steeping time, and the sweetening is left entirely to the maker.
- The ginger is the whole pointA raw piece of ginger sitting in cold juice gives up very little. Bruise or slice the root first and give it at least two hours in the chilled mixture, or simmer it in the pint of water for five minutes, cool that infusion, and use it as the water called for. "A small piece" is roughly a one-inch knob.
- Grape juiceA quart bottle in this period would most likely have been unfermented Concord juice, sweet and deeply purple. Modern Concord juice is the closest match; white grape juice will give a very different, blander drink.
- Grapefruit juiceFresh-squeezed is what was meant, and it is markedly more bitter and less sweet than most cartoned juice today. One cup is about one large grapefruit.
- Sweeten to tasteSimple syrup is easier than granulated sugar, which dissolves only slowly in a cold liquid. Start with a quarter cup of syrup for the full batch and taste; Concord juice is already sweet and may need none at all.
- YieldAbout one and three-quarter quarts before ice (one cup, one pint and one quart together make 56 fl oz), or roughly twelve to fourteen punch-cup servings. Six generous tumblers if served as a long drink.
- Cracked iceCracked ice chills fast and dilutes fast. If the punch will stand on a table, chill it thoroughly first and use large cubes or a block instead.
Bottled unfermented grape juice was a product of the late nineteenth century, and its rise is bound up with the American temperance movement, which wanted a respectable drink for the punch bowl. Under national Prohibition, grape juice punches were a staple of hostess literature. The grapefruit here is worth noticing too: it was still a comparatively new commercial crop in the United States, promoted from Florida and later the Texas Rio Grande Valley in the early decades of the century.