Ginger Ale​ Frost

This will be my last drink post for a while. It’s a good drink for those warm first days of fall. I’ll be continuing the “Baking without…” series and I want to visit some lunch box recipes and wartime lunchbox packing tips. I also have few non-recipe posts coming up. I hope you’ll enjoy what’s in store for the coming weeks.

I wanted to include this recipe because it involves a little more prep than the others I’ve written about. It also is a good example of how cookbooks and magazines included help for the home front housewife in the form of tips and substitution ideas. This recipe suggests using corn syrup in place of half of the sugar required for the drink. This helped the housewife save some of her sugar rations for other recipes.

Ginger Ale Frost

1/2 c. granulated sugar

1 c. hot water

5 whole cloves

1 3″ stick cinnamon

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1 1/2 c. orange juice

1 c. canned grapefruit juice

3 1/2 c. pale dry ginger ale

ice

Boil the sugar and water together for 5 minutes. Add spices, and let stand for 1 1/2 hours. Strain through several thicknesses of cheesecloth. Add the fruit juices and chill. Just before serving, add the ginger ale and pour it into ice-filled glasses. This makes 6 1/2 glasses before adding the ice. Corn syrup may replace half of the sugar.

I didn’t have cheesecloth, so I used an empty tea bag as a strainer. This worked really well but made pouring each glass a slow process. Slow, but not tedious.

Result

This is a lovely spiced ginger ale. It got mixed reactions from my testers. You can definitely taste the spices, but the grapefruit juice is not overpowering. One tester who dislikes grapefruit juice liked this drink, but another who dislikes nutmeg didn’t like this at all. This recipe is a bit time consuming, but I enjoyed it enough to recommend trying it at least once.