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Fruit Cup, Mint Jelly Top
Combine the desired fruits and chill well. Make a collar for the sherbet cups in which served, by inverting the cup over a small paper doily of lacy design, and tracing around the cup. Carefully cut out this circle, then slip the collar over the cup. Fill with the fruit, and top off with mint jelly. Serve very cold.
A first-course fruit cup from a period menu book, given as a method rather than a formula \the cook. The only fixed elements are the chilled fruit, the mint jelly on top, and the paper collar that turns a plain glass into table decoration.
- No quantities givenThe original assumes the cook knows her own numbers. A modern rule of thumb is roughly a half to three-quarters cup of prepared fruit per serving, which for eight comes to something in the region of a quart to a quart and a half; adjust to the size of the cups you are using.
- "Sherbet cups"Small stemmed vessels, commonly in the region of 4 to 8 ounces, close in shape to what is sold today as a coupe or dessert glass. Any short-stemmed cup of that capacity works; the recipe does not specify the material.
- Choosing the fruitPeriod fruit cups leaned on orange and grapefruit sections, seedless grapes, diced pear and apple, and canned pineapple. Toss apple, pear or banana with citrus juice as you cut it, and drain everything well so the jelly does not sit in a pool of syrup.
- The mint jellyCommercial mint jelly is firm and vividly green. Cut it into small cubes with a wet knife, or beat it briefly with a fork to loosen it; a whole spoonful set on the fruit reads as a lump rather than a garnish.
- Chilling"Serve very cold" is the point of the dish. Chill the fruit at least two hours and the glasses along with it, and do not dress or top the cups until the moment they go to the table.
- The paper collarInvert the glass on a lace paper doily, trace, then cut a hole slightly smaller than the glass so the collar grips. Do this well ahead, and slip the collars on before filling; paper and damp fruit do not cooperate.
- ServingThe recipe gives no indication of where the cup falls in the meal or of an underplate. Whatever the course, assemble it as late as possible and keep it in the refrigerator until it goes to the table.
Fruit cup was a common genteel opener at American dinners in the first half of the twentieth century, occupying a slot that soup or oysters had held earlier and that a salad or shrimp cocktail would later take. Its popularity is generally linked to the growing year-round availability of Florida and California citrus and of canned pineapple, which let a cook in November put fresh-tasting fruit on the table. The mint jelly supplies a bright green accent, and mint jelly was also the traditional accompaniment to lamb. The paper doily collar belongs to a wider decorative impulse of the period, in which a hostess was expected to produce visual effect from inexpensive materials.