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Grape-Fruit Cocktail
Select heavy grape-fruit (weight means more pulp than rind). Chill, cut in halves, and remove the sections of pulp, preserving the shape of sections if possible. Remove the skins from Malaga grapes, cut in halves lengthwise, remove seeds (there should be equal quantity of both grape-fruit pulp and prepared grapes). Reserve the juice. Chill fruit thoroughly, serve in tall stem glasses, add a little juice, sprinkle each with a tablespoon bar sugar, and just before serving pour over each portion one tablespoon Sloe Gin or "Sweet" Sherry Wine.
A first-course fruit cocktail of the sort that opened formal American dinners in the early 1900s. Nothing here is difficult; the work is entirely in the knife and the chilling.
- Bar sugarThis is superfine (caster) sugar, ground finer than granulated so it dissolves in cold juice without grittiness. Granulated sugar buzzed briefly in a spice grinder does the same job. A tablespoon per portion is generous by modern taste — start with a teaspoon and adjust; many grapefruit varieties common now are sweeter than the tart white-fleshed fruit usual when the book appeared.
- Malaga grapesA large, firm, seeded table grape with a thick skin, once the standard winter grape in American markets and now uncommon. Red Globe is the closest widely sold equivalent; seedless red or green grapes work and save the seeding step, though they are softer and less meaty.
- Sloe ginA sweetened gin infused with blackthorn sloes, dark red and quite sweet. Commercial versions vary enormously in sugar; the cheap bright-red ones are candy. If using one of those, cut the bar sugar back sharply or leave it out.
- Sherry"Sweet" sherry here means cream sherry or a sweet oloroso, not fino. A tablespoon per glass is the whole spirit content — this is a fruit course with a spoonful of wine on it, not a cocktail.
- ChillingThe recipe insists on cold twice, and it matters. Prepare the fruit several hours ahead and refrigerate it in its own juice; grapefruit served near room temperature tastes flabby and its bitterness comes forward.
- Add the alcohol last"Just before serving" is not fussiness. Sloe gin and sherry sitting on cut fruit for an hour bleed color and dull the fruit's texture.
- Yield and glassesThe recipe gives no quantities: grapefruit halves emptied of their sections plus an equal quantity of prepared grapes, divided between stemmed glasses. Any tall stemmed glass will do — coupes, wine glasses, or footed sherbet glasses.
- Serving without alcoholOmit the spirit entirely and the dish still works as written; a little of the reserved grapefruit juice and the sugar are enough. The book was published in an era when a wine glass at Sunday dinner was ordinary, but the fruit carries itself.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the wave of American menu books issued in the 1910s to organize the middle-class household's most formal meal of the week, and it reflects a moment when grapefruit had only recently become a fashionable table fruit in the United States. Florida groves had expanded rapidly in the 1890s and early 1900s, and refrigerated rail shipping put the fruit in northern markets through the winter. Serving fruit as a cocktail, in a stemmed glass with a spoonful of wine or spirit, echoed the alcoholic cocktail that preceded a gentleman's dinner; the term "fruit cocktail" in this period meant a first course of cut fresh fruit, not the canned syrup mixture that later took over the name. The Malaga grape called for was a Spanish variety grown extensively in California by then, prized for a thick skin that let it keep well into the winter months.