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Orange Mint Cocktail
6 maraschino cherries 2 T cherry juice 1 T finely chopped mint 3 T sugar Divide oranges into sections and cut in pieces. Add sugar and cherry juice and set aside to chill for one hour. Chop mint finely, mix with oranges, pile high in small glasses and place a cherry on top of each.
A fruit cup rather than a drink, and the ingredient list is incomplete as printed — the oranges themselves never got a quantity. A few notes before you start.
- The missing orangesThe recipe calls for oranges in the method but omits them from the list. The other quantities suit about 4 medium oranges for six glasses; the sugar and cherry juice are there to draw juice from the fruit, not to swamp it.
- T means tablespoonCapital T here is a tablespoon: 3 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons cherry juice, 1 tablespoon chopped mint. (Lowercase t for teaspoon is the usual companion convention, though no lowercase t appears in this recipe.)
- "Cocktail" here is a course, not a drinkThere is no alcohol in it. Early twentieth-century menus used cocktail for any small, sharp opener served in a stemmed glass — fruit cocktail, oyster cocktail, tomato cocktail.
- Section the oranges properlyCut away the peel and white pith, then free the segments from their membranes and cut those into pieces. Membrane left on turns tough and bitter as the fruit sits in sugar.
- Chop the mint lastThe instruction repeats itself, but the second mention is the operative one: mint goes in after the hour of chilling. Cut mint bruises and darkens fairly quickly, and an hour sitting in sugared juice would do its colour and freshness no favours.
- Maraschino cherries have changedThe name originally meant cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, with a distinct bitter-almond note, though by the 1900s cheaper American imitations made in brine with flavouring and dye were already common. Today's are brined, bleached and dyed, then sweetened with corn syrup — much sweeter and blander. Taste the syrup before adding the full 2 tablespoons, and cut the sugar if it is very sweet.
- Mint varietySpearmint is the common garden mint and the one that suits the oranges. Peppermint is far more aggressive; use half as much if it is all you have.
- Yield and glassesSix cherries suggests six servings. Small stemmed glasses, chilled, and pile the fruit high as directed — the height is the whole presentation.
Church and club cookbooks from the first decades of the twentieth century are full of "cocktails" that contain nothing stronger than fruit juice, and a church-society collection is exactly where you would expect to find them. The temperance movement was strong in Protestant churches, and the fashionable word was borrowed for the fashionable course while the contents stayed dry. Fruit cocktails of this kind depended on two things becoming ordinary: refrigerated rail cars bringing Florida and California citrus into the Midwest, and the bottled maraschino cherry, which by this period was widely available rather than a luxury. The technique — macerate cut fruit with sugar, chill an hour, garnish, serve in small glasses — is a standard template of the era, varied endlessly with grapefruit, pineapple, white grapes or a spoonful of ginger ale.