Fruit Cup
Remove skin and seeds from 1/2 pound white grapes. If grapes are firm, boiling water may be poured over them and allowed to stand 1 minute, when skins will come off easily. Pare 2 oranges, removing white part with the skin, and remove sections free from membrane. Cut 4 slices canned pineapple in dice. Mix the fruit with 1/3 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1/2 cup orange juice, 1/2 cup syrup from canned pineapple, and Few grains salt. Put into ice cream freezer, surround with ice and salt, and stir occasionally until juice begins to freeze. Serve in cocktail glasses, garnishing each glass with a Maraschino cherry.
A fruit cocktail chilled to the slush stage rather than frozen solid. The technique matters more than the fruit: it should be granular and barely icy, not a sorbet.
- The hinge: stop at slushStir only until the juice begins to set into crystals around the fruit. Taken further, the sugar syrup freezes hard and the orange sections turn woolly.
- Without an ice cream freezerPour the mixed fruit and juices into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 20 minutes for about an hour and a half. A salted ice bath and a bowl with occasional stirring works as well.
- White grapes"White" means green table grapes. Modern seedless varieties make the seeding step unnecessary, and their skins are thin enough that peeling can be skipped, though the 1-minute boiling-water dip still loosens them if you want the cleaner texture.
- Canned pineappleFour slices is only part of a standard 20 oz can, which holds something like ten slices; a smaller can covers it, and any of them will give up the half cup of syrup called for. Buy pineapple in syrup, not in juice, or the cup will taste thin.
- SugarA third of a cup with pineapple syrup on top of it is sweet by current taste. Mix, taste cold, and hold back some of the sugar if the fruit is ripe -- freezing mutes sweetness, so it should read slightly sweeter than you want.
- Removing the white partPare the oranges with a knife rather than peeling by hand, cutting deep enough to take the pith off with the skin, then free the sections from their membranes. The pith is what makes a fruit cup bitter after it sits.
- YieldSomething like four cups of prepared fruit and liquid, which should fill five or six small cocktail glasses as a first course; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Fruit cup was the standard opening course of the American ladies' luncheon in the 1910s and 1920s, when a chilled fruit cocktail in a stemmed glass replaced soup as a lighter, more fashionable start to a midday meal. The whole point is that it can be assembled in the morning, set in the freezer's ice and salt, stirred occasionally as it freezes, and brought out at the table without cooking. Canned pineapple and maraschino cherries were both markers of modernity rather than economy -- Hawaiian pineapple canning had grown into a substantial industry by the 1910s, and the bright cherry was the near-obligatory garnish for anything served in a cocktail glass.