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Fruit Cocktail
1/2 pound Tokay grapes 1 cup diced pineapple 1 cup diced apples 1/2 cup pineapple juice 1/3 cup lemon juice Wash the grapes, pick from the stem, and remove the seeds by cutting the grapes lengthwise into quarters. After removing the seeds, cut each quarter in half crosswise, making eight pieces of the grapes. Cut the pineapple into small cubes. The canned pineapple serves for this purpose, though fresh pineapple may be used instead. Peel the apples, and cut into small cubes, and mix immediately with the lemon juice to prevent discoloration. Add the pineapple juice and the other fruits. Let this stand on ice two or three hours until the flavors are well blended. Just before serving, place the fruit in stemmed sherbet glasses, and pack in ice in compote dishes. On top of the fruit, pipe a rosette of whipped cream through a star-shaped pastry tube. The cream should be slightly sweetened and flavored with a little lemon or almond extract.
A simple macerated fruit dish that depends almost entirely on the acid balance and a long chill. Two things need attention: the grapes, and the amount of lemon juice.
- Tokay grapesFlame Tokay was a large, red, seeded table grape once common in American markets and now rarely sold. Any firm red grape works; if you use seedless ones, skip the quartering and simply halve them, since the eight-piece cut exists only to get the seeds out.
- Half a pound of grapesAbout 1 1/2 cups whole, which yields roughly a cup once cut. That brings the dish to about three cups of fruit total, or four modest sherbet-glass servings.
- The lemon juice is a lotA third of a cup against three cups of fruit is sharply tart by current taste, and the original adds no sugar at all. Toss the apples in two or three tablespoons to stop them browning, then add the rest to taste along with the pineapple juice.
- Canned pineapple juiceCanned pineapple packed in its own juice gives you both ingredients at once. If you use fresh pineapple you will need to buy juice separately, or press some from the trimmings.
- ApplesChoose a firm variety that will not go mealy sitting in acid for three hours — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Honeycrisp. Cut the cubes small, about 1/2 inch, so they take up the juice.
- Two to three hours in the refrigerator is right, and the maceration is the point; the fruit will not taste of much before then. Left much longer than that it stops improving, as the apple gradually softens.
- Packing in iceThe compote dishes packed with ice are a service flourish from an era of unreliable refrigeration. A well-chilled bowl or glass does the same work.
- The whipped creamSweeten lightly and use almond or lemon extract with restraint — a scant 1/4 teaspoon for a cup of cream. Pipe it shortly before it goes to the table, since it will soften and weep into the juice as it stands.
Fruit cocktail appeared in American dining rooms in the early twentieth century as a first course rather than a dessert: the word cocktail appears to have been borrowed from the bar to mean any small, sharp, appetite-opening dish served in a stemmed glass, and oyster cocktail and clam cocktail sat beside it on the same menus. The style here — fruit cut to uniform small pieces, dressed with citrus, chilled, and finished with a piped rosette — belongs to the professional-tinged domestic cookery taught in cooking schools of the period. Books of meatless cookery multiplied around the First World War, when American households were urged to conserve meat, and fruit and vegetable courses were pressed into service to make a meal feel complete. Canned pineapple, offered here as the default rather than the substitute, fits the period too — Hawaiian canneries had made it cheap and reliable, and cooks treated the syrup or juice in the tin as an ingredient in its own right.