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Pink Pomelo Pyramid
Shred from the pulp every vestige of white rag and break sections into bits not over half an inch in length. Serve in tall slim glasses with a meringue of stiff-whipped white of egg and sugar and bits of angelica. A little shaved ice may be placed with the fruit. The combination of pink, white, yellow, and pale green gives a pretty effect. Where the pink pomelos or shaddocks cannot be secured a few drops of cochineal may be added to the fruit and sugar and let stand an hour or more, or the cochineal may be used merely on the bits of ice, or in the meringue.
A cold fruit cup from the era when grapefruit was still called pomelo or shaddock. The fruit work is sound; the topping is the problem.
- The uncooked meringueThe white-of-egg and sugar topping is never heated at any point — it goes straight onto cold fruit and shaved ice and is eaten raw. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk. If you want a pink-and-white fruit glass, use a current recipe with a topping designed to be safe uncooked.
- CochinealCochineal itself is still a legal food colour (carmine, from the scale insect Dactylopius coccus), though household colouring bottles of this period were not standardised in the way a modern bottle is. It is also a recognised allergen for a small number of people. Modern carmine or any red food colour gives the same effect.
- Pomelo, shaddock, grapefruitIn this period the three words were used loosely for the same fruit. What the author wants is a pink or ruby grapefruit; true pomelo is much larger, drier and milder, and its thick pith makes the shredding step far more work.
- "Every vestige of white rag"The rag is the pith and the membrane between segments. This is the step that decides whether the dish is pleasant or bitter, and it is genuinely tedious — supreming the fruit with a knife over a bowl to catch the juice is faster than picking segments apart by hand.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a standard confectioner's green. It is now sold mainly by specialist bakery suppliers; candied citron or a fine julienne of candied lime peel reads the same way on the plate.
- Shaved iceIce placed with the fruit dilutes as it melts, so the fruit is worth sweetening a little more heavily than it would be on its own.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; as a rough guide one large pink grapefruit will fill roughly two to three tall glasses once the pith and membrane are gone.
"Pomelo" and "shaddock" were the usual American names for grapefruit into the early twentieth century — shaddock after a ship captain generally credited with carrying the seed from the East Indies to Barbados in the seventeenth century, from where the grapefruit is thought to have arisen as a hybrid. Florida groves had only recently made the fruit commercially available in the North, and pink-fleshed varieties were a novelty, which is why the recipe bothers with a workaround for cooks who could only get the pale kind. Fruit books of this period lean heavily on colour: the dish is arranged and described as a picture, pink and white and yellow and pale green in a tall slim glass.