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Grape-Juice High Ball
Use Niagara grapes. Proceed as for recipe for chilled grapejuice. Serve in tall glasses half filled with shaved ice and add an addition equal quantity of charged water. Lemon is an attractive .
A two-ingredient drink whose text has come down to us garbled at both ends: it depends on an earlier recipe in the same chapter, and the final sentence breaks off mid-thought. What survives is enough to work from.
- It is not a cocktailA "high ball" in this period means spirits lengthened with soda in a tall glass; the grape-juice version is the temperance imitation, with no alcohol at all. Nothing is missing from the ingredient list.
- Charged waterCharged, aerated or carbonated water all mean the same thing: plain soda water or seltzer. Use unflavoured and unsweetened, and open it cold so it keeps its gas.
- Niagara grapesA white American slip-skin grape of the labrusca type, sweet and strongly musky, still grown around the Great Lakes but rarely sold far outside the region. Any good unsweetened white grape juice stands in; a white Concord-type juice comes closest to the flavour intended.
- The recipe it leans on"Chilled grape juice" recipes of this kind generally involve crushing the fruit, warming it just enough to loosen the juice from the skins, straining through a cloth or jelly bag, sweetening lightly and chilling. Keep the heat gentle and avoid a hard boil, which tends to cloud the juice.
- The garbled proportions"Add an addition equal quantity" is a garbling of "an equal quantity" — one part juice to one part soda. Because the glass is already half filled with ice, the drink comes out weaker than 1:1 as the ice melts.
- Shaved iceThe recipe specifies shaved rather than cubed ice: it chills instantly and dilutes fast. A food processor or a bag and a rolling pin will produce it; cubes will give you a colder, less diluted, sweeter drink.
- The unfinished sentence"Lemon is an attractive" almost certainly ended in "addition" or "garnish." A thin slice on the rim, or a squeeze of juice into the glass, cuts the muskiness of labrusca juice noticeably.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Working at roughly 4 oz juice and 4 oz soda per tall glass, a quart of juice would make about eight drinks.
Bottled unfermented grape juice was a product of the American temperance movement before it was a grocery staple: the pasteurising method for keeping grape juice sweet is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist in New Jersey, who in the 1860s wanted an unfermented wine for communion. By the time recipes like these were collected, the juice had migrated from the church to the parlour, and cookbooks were busy building mock versions of the saloon's repertoire — grape-juice high balls, fruit punches, "cups" and shrubs served in the same tall glasses over the same shaved ice. The specification of Niagara grapes rather than Concord is worth noting: Niagara gives a pale golden juice rather than a purple one.