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Fruit Cup
1 C white grapes (remove seeds) 1 C orange sections 1 C pineapple 1/2 C orange juice 1/2 C pineapple syrup or juice, sugar and few grains of salt Mix and put in container, pack in ice and salt and stir occasionally until juice begins to freeze. To serve, garnish with maraschino cherries. Makes eight small or six large servings.
Mrs. S. C. Kimball.
A fruit cup in this sense is a chilled first course served in a stemmed glass, not a drink. The recipe is straightforward; the only real technique is the semi-frozen texture.
- White grapesThese are green table grapes, and since the recipe tells you to remove the seeds they were a seeded variety. Modern seedless grapes remove the seeding step entirely, so the parenthetical instruction no longer applies.
- Pineapple and its syrupThe recipe assumes canned pineapple packed in heavy syrup, which supplied both the fruit and the half cup of sweetened liquid. Cans packed in juice are now the norm; if you use those, taste and adjust the sugar, since the original relied on the syrup for much of the sweetness.
- Unmeasured sugarNo quantity is given. Two to four tablespoons suits a quart of fruit, depending on the ripeness of the pineapple and the oranges; add it to the juice and stir until dissolved before combining.
- The salt"Few grains" means a pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. It sharpens the fruit rather than seasoning it, and is easy to overdo.
- Ice and saltThe original packs the container in a bucket of crushed ice layered with rock salt, the same arrangement as a hand-crank ice cream freezer — the salt drops the ice below freezing point so the mixture chills faster than it would in ice alone. A shallow metal pan in the freezer does the same work.
- Stir occasionallyThis is the hinge. The mixture should end up slushy, with soft crystals suspended in juice, not frozen into a block. Stir every fifteen or twenty minutes and stop while it still pours thickly.
- ServingSix to eight portions, spooned into glasses with a maraschino cherry on top. It softens quickly, so assemble it just before it goes to the table.
Fruit cups belong to the era when a chilled fruit course opened a formal meal, and the name itself is telling: in American usage "cocktail" long meant any small, sharp appetizer served in a stemmed glass — fruit cocktail, shrimp cocktail. The recipe also depends entirely on canned goods and shipped citrus, the pineapple in syrup and the maraschino cherries being pantry staples that made out-of-season fruit possible. Community cookbooks like this one, sold to raise money and made up of members' contributed and signed recipes, are among the best surviving records of what such households actually put on the table.