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Grapefruit and Grape Cocktail
2 grapefruits or 1 can grapefruit 2 cups white grapes 12 Maraschino cherries Sugar 2 teaspoons Maraschino liquor Remove sections of grapefruit, free from fibrous skin. Line cocktail glasses, half fill with white grapes and six of the cherries, cut fine. Add a very little sugar to draw juices from fruit, if fresh fruit is used. If canned fruit is used, add sugar to taste and two tablespoons juice to each glass. Chill well. When ready to serve, add a few drops of the Maraschino liquor and top with a whole cherry. Serves 6.
A fruit cup served in stemmed glasses as a first course, not a drink. Almost everything hinges on the fruit being cut clean and served very cold.
- "Cocktail" means a fruit cupIn menu books of this period a cocktail at the head of the meal was as often fruit or shellfish as it was alcohol. Serve it in chilled stemmed glasses before the soup, with a small fork or a teaspoon.
- Sectioning the grapefruitCut off top and bottom, stand the fruit up, and pare away peel and white pith down to the flesh, then cut each segment free of the membranes over a bowl to catch juice. Two grapefruits give roughly enough segments to line six glasses; the caught juice is worth adding back.
- White grapesThese are green table grapes. Modern seedless varieties need only halving; if you use a seeded grape, halve and flick out the pips.
- Maraschino liquorThis means maraschino liqueur, a clear cherry spirit, not the syrup in a jar of cocktail cherries. Two teaspoons split six ways works out at roughly a third of a teaspoon per glass, though the recipe itself says only a few drops; more than that turns the whole thing medicinal.
- The twelve cherriesSix are chopped fine and mixed through the fruit, six are kept whole for the tops.
- Sugar is deliberately vagueThe point of the "very little" sugar on fresh fruit is osmotic, not sweetening: a teaspoon or so per glass draws juice out of the grapefruit and grapes to make a syrup. Canned grapefruit comes already in syrup, though the recipe still directs you to add sugar to taste and two tablespoons of juice per glass.
- ChillingAn hour in the refrigerator does both jobs — it macerates the fruit and gets the glasses properly cold. Add the liqueur and the whole cherry only at the moment of serving, so the aroma is still there.
- YieldSix glasses, as stated. It scales straight up, but sectioning grapefruit for a crowd is slow work and is best done the morning of.