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Pineapple Cup
2 C crushed pineapple Juice 1 grapefruit Juice 2 oranges 1 T lemon juice ½ bottle maraschino cherries ½ glass melted red currant jelly Chill and serve in punch glasses. Six servings.
A chilled fruit cup rather than a mixed drink — closer to a spoonable first course than a punch, and thick enough that it wants a spoon alongside the glass. The measurements are church-cookbook shorthand, so a few need translating.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon. The 2 cups of crushed pineapple is the canned product, drained or not as you like; using it with its syrup makes the cup noticeably sweeter.
- That "glass" of jelly"glass" here is the tumbler jelly was sold and set in, commonly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, so the ½ glass called for works out to roughly 3 to 4 fluid ounces. This is genuinely approximate; add it gradually and stop when the cup tastes balanced rather than candied.
- Melting the jellyWarm the currant jelly gently over low heat or in a bowl of hot water only until it liquefies, then cool it before combining. Poured in hot it will thin the juices and dull the fresh citrus.
- Maraschino cherriesBottle sizes were not standard, so ½ bottle is not a figure that converts cleanly; a modern 8- to 10-ounce jar is a reasonable working equivalent. Modern cherries are sweet and brightly dyed; taste before you add all of them.
- Juice quantitiesOne grapefruit yields roughly 3/4 cup, two oranges about 3/4 to 1 cup. Strain out the pulp and seeds if you want the cup clear beneath the fruit.
- ChillingCombine everything and refrigerate at least two hours. The flavors are flat straight from the mixing bowl and the jelly needs time to distribute; stir again before serving.
- ServingSix servings in the small punch glasses the recipe calls for, and that is the right scale — this is dessert-sweet. Serve very cold, with a spoon, and hold the ice out of the glass so it does not water down.
Church and club cookbooks of the 1920s and 1930s are full of "cups" like this one, and their prominence says something about the era: with Prohibition in force from 1920 to 1933, and temperance sentiment outlasting it by decades, the fruit cup and the fruit punch did the ceremonial work that wine and cocktails did elsewhere. The building blocks are the era's proudest pantry goods — canned crushed pineapple, bottled maraschino cherries, tumblers of currant jelly — all of them industrial products marketed hard to American home cooks in the first decades of the century, and all of them able to make something festive-looking in February. Red currant jelly as a sweetener and coloring agent in cold fruit dishes is older than the cans, carried over from nineteenth-century table practice, where it also served with game and in sauces.