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Grape-Juice Lemonade
Juice of 3 lemons. 1/4 cup sugar. 2 cups grape juice Enough ice-water to cup sugar make a quart Combine ingredients in the order given. Chill for half an hour. Serve in each glass a thin slice of lemon from which the seeds have been removed. This quantity will serve six water glasses or eighteen punch glasses. Enough ice-water to make a quart.
A punch-bowl formula from a company cookbook, printed in two columns that have collapsed into a single run of text. Read it as an ingredient list followed by three sentences of method.
- Reading the garbled listThe original set the ingredients in narrow columns: 2 cups grape juice, some quantity of sugar, and enough ice-water to make a quart. The sugar measure has been lost in the type — it was almost certainly a fraction of a cup, though how much cannot be recovered; start with a quarter cup and sweeten to taste.
- Where is the lemonDespite the name, no lemon juice survives in the printed text. A drink built on 2 cups of sweetened grape juice needs acid to earn the title; the juice of two lemons, strained, brings it into balance. The thin slice in the glass is garnish, not flavouring.
- Grape juice of the periodThis would almost certainly have been unfermented bottled juice, most likely Concord, the sweet purple sort sold as a temperance drink. It is generally sweeter and more grapey than a modern varietal or white grape juice, so taste before adding the full measure of sugar.
- Dissolving the sugar"Combine in the order given" puts sugar into cold juice, where it dissolves slowly and grits at the bottom. Stir the sugar into a little of the juice first, or make a simple syrup and cool it, then add the ice-water.
- Ice-water, not iceThe quart is measured with the water included, so the drink is diluted to strength before chilling. Adding ice cubes to the pitcher on top of that will thin it further as they melt; chill the mixture and ice the glasses instead.
- Chilling timeHalf an hour in a modern refrigerator will not take a room-temperature quart much below cool. Give it two hours, or start with juice and water already cold.
- YieldOne quart, stated as six water glasses or eighteen punch glasses — that is roughly 5 oz and a shade under 2 oz respectively, the punch glass being a small stemmed cup rather than a tumbler.
Bottled unfermented grape juice was a product of the late nineteenth-century temperance movement, and its commercial success is generally traced to the pasteurising work of Thomas Bramwell Welch and his son in New Jersey; by the 1910s and 1920s it was a fixture of church socials, ladies' luncheons and any gathering where wine punch was unwelcome. Recipes like this one — grape juice, sugar, lemon, water, served in punch glasses — are the non-alcoholic cousin of claret cup, borrowing the same bowl, the same fruit garnish and the same social function.