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Grape Fruit Cocktail
To four tablespoons of grape-fruit juice add one table.. spoon each of simple sugar-syrup, brandy, and maraschino, Pour these on to a glassful of shaved ice and when well mixed place in the glass from which the cocktail is to be served, adding to it a third of a section of fruit pulp from which every suspicion of white fibre has been removed.
A short, strong grapefruit aperitif from the era when a "cocktail" at the table often meant a chilled fruit course rather than a mixed drink. Everything depends on the fruit being cleanly cut and the ice being fine.
- Maraschino means the liqueurThis is maraschino liqueur — a clear cherry liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries, pits included, such as Luxardo — not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. It is far less sweet than that syrup, and substituting the syrup makes the drink cloying and unbalanced.
- Simple sugar-syrupThe recipe does not give a strength. A 1:1 syrup — equal weights sugar and water, heated only until clear, then cooled — is the mildest reading, and one tablespoon of that carries roughly half a tablespoon of sugar; period syrups were often made heavier, so taste and stop when the tartness is corrected.
- Proportions and yieldFour tablespoons of juice is a quarter cup, and the whole build comes to about 7 tablespoons before ice — one small cocktail glass. For a first course at a dinner, multiply per guest rather than batching, since grapefruit juice turns bitter as it sits.
- Shaved ice, then strain"A glassful of shaved ice" reads as the mixing vessel, not the serving glass: the mixture is combined over the ice and then transferred. Mix until well chilled, which dilutes at the same time, then pour off into the serving glass.
- Removing every suspicion of white fibreThis is what modern cooks call supreming: cut away peel and pith, then free each segment from its membranes with a knife. The membrane is where most of the bitterness sits, and a single strand of it ruins the clean finish the recipe is after.
- A third of a sectionNot a third of the fruit — a third of one segment, a small piece of pulp dropped in as garnish. Any more and it becomes a fruit cup.
- The fruit itselfGrapefruit of this period was seedier and considerably sharper than today's Ruby Red or Star Ruby, both much later selections. With a sweet modern variety you may want less syrup, or a squeeze of lemon to restore the edge.
- Grapefruit and medicationGrapefruit juice interferes with the metabolism of a long list of common drugs, including some statins and blood-pressure medicines. Worth knowing before serving it to a table of guests.
Grapefruit reached American tables late — it was still a curiosity in the mid-nineteenth century and became a commercial Florida crop in the decades around the turn of the century. Its early role was largely as an opening course: halved and sugared at breakfast, or, as here, cut up and lightly spirited as the first thing set before a dinner guest. The fruit cocktail in this sense predates the canned fruit salad that later took the name; it belonged to the same moment as the oyster cocktail and the clam cocktail, all of them small, cold, sharp things meant to wake up the appetite. Brandy and maraschino were a familiar pairing in period bar practice, and the recipe assumes a household that kept a liqueur cupboard.