Grapeade
Measure two or three tablespoons Syrup into each glass, add a little cracked ice and fill with cold water.
A one-line assembly instruction that assumes you already have a jar of grape syrup on the shelf — the recipe immediately preceding it in most books of this type. Everything worth saying is about that syrup and the ratio.
- The syrup is the recipe"Syrup" capitalised points to a prepared grape syrup, presumably given elsewhere in the book: grape juice cooked down with sugar and bottled, with proportions that varied from book to book. Without it this page is only a dilution ratio. A bottled grape syrup or a heavy grape concentrate stands in; ordinary bottled grape juice is far too weak to use at two tablespoons per glass.
- Ratio and glass sizeTwo to three tablespoons (about 1 to 1.5 oz) in a tumbler of roughly 8 to 10 oz gives a drink somewhere between one part syrup to four parts water and one to nine, depending on glass and measure. Start at two tablespoons and taste.
- Cracked iceIce was chipped from a block with a pick, so the pieces were irregular and small. Crushed ice from a bag is the nearest equivalent; it chills faster and dilutes faster, so pour and drink promptly.
- Cold waterThis most likely meant simply fresh cold water rather than water with ice stirred into it, since the ice goes into the glass separately. Chilled still water is right; sparkling water turns it into a grape soda, which is a different drink but a good one.
- Acid balanceCooked-down grape syrup can read flat once diluted. A squeeze of lemon per glass sharpens it without reading as lemonade.
- YieldAs written, one glass. A quart of syrup makes roughly twenty to thirty servings at this rate, which is why these books treat the syrup as the thing to put up in quantity.
Fruit "ades" — lemonade, orangeade, raspberry vinegar, grapeade — were, by most accounts, among the usual non-alcoholic drinks of the American luncheon and church-social table from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and they existed because syrup keeps and fresh fruit does not. A household might boil down the September grape crop with sugar, seal it in bottles, and draw on it through the winter; the finished drink was then a matter of measuring and pouring, which is exactly why this entry is a single sentence. Concord grapes, widely planted in the Northeast after their introduction in the 1850s, gave the deep colour and musky flavour most readers of a book like this would have had in mind. The commercial version of the same idea — pasteurised unfermented grape juice — was being marketed in the same decades, and the bottled grape drink on a modern shelf can be seen as a distant relative of the home syrup jar this recipe assumes.