Real grenadine is pomegranate syrup. The name comes from grenade, the French word for pomegranate, and the original ingredient was nothing more complicated than the fruit's juice cooked down with sugar. The red-dyed corn syrup that calls itself grenadine in most American bars is a mid-20th-century industrial substitute — and the reason so many classic cocktails calling for grenadine taste wrong when you mix them at home.
What Was Lost
Pre-Prohibition cocktail books take grenadine for granted — a Jack Rose, a Bacardi, a Pink Lady all assume the bartender has real pomegranate syrup on hand. By the 1950s, the commercial product had drifted to high-fructose corn syrup, citric acid, and red dye, and the recipes that depended on it drifted with it. The result: a generation of bartenders who had never tasted what these drinks were supposed to be.
Real grenadine is fruit, sugar, and a small amount of orange flower water for aromatic lift. It has a deep, almost wine-like complexity — tannic, slightly tart, and unmistakably pomegranate. Mix one Jack Rose with the supermarket bottle and one with the homemade syrup and the comparison ends the argument.
The Build
Bottled pomegranate juice — POM Wonderful or equivalent, 100% juice with nothing added — is the practical starting point. Fresh-juiced pomegranates are better but tedious; the bottled product is honest and works. Combine equal parts juice and sugar by volume, warm to dissolve, finish with a small measure of orange flower water.
Orange Flower Water
A scant teaspoon per cup of finished syrup. Orange flower water — sold at Middle Eastern groceries and good supermarkets — is intensely aromatic and will overpower the pomegranate if you use too much. The amount is about right when you can smell it just barely on the surface of the syrup.
Storage and Shelf Life
Refrigerated in a clean jar, the syrup keeps about three weeks. Pomegranate juice oxidises faster than citrus, so the colour will darken over time even while the flavour holds — that is normal. If a film develops on the surface, the batch has fermented; throw it out and make another.
Bottom Line
Five minutes of stove time and a bottle of pomegranate juice unlocks an entire wing of the pre-Prohibition cocktail canon. The Jack Rose, the Bacardi (in its real spec), the Pink Lady, the Mary Pickford, the Hurricane — all of them depend on the real ingredient to make sense.