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Raspberry Cocktail
2 cups red currants 2 cups ripe raspberries 1/2 cup sugar Mash currants and strain. Pour juice and sugar over well picked-over, firm raspberries. Chill well. Serve in glasses very carefully, so that the raspberries may be preserved whole. If desired, a little powdered sugar may be placed on top when serving. Serves 6.
A cold fruit cup served as a first course, not a mixed drink. The whole point is texture: the raspberries must stay intact, so everything else is done before they go in the bowl.
- Dissolve the sugar first1/2 cup of granulated sugar will dissolve in cold juice only slowly, and stirring it in among the berries breaks them. Whisk the sugar into the strained currant juice until it is clear, then pour it over the raspberries.
- Currant yieldTwo cups of red currants, stemmed and crushed, give roughly 3/4 cup of juice. Push the pulp through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth; a jelly bag left to drip gives a clearer juice but less of it.
- StrainingDo not force the pulp hard against the sieve. Currant skins and seeds carry a dry astringency, and the juice stays brighter if you let most of it fall through on its own.
- If you have no fresh currantsRed currants are briefly available in midsummer and rarely stocked. Unsweetened bottled currant juice or thawed frozen currants, strained, work; cranberry juice is the nearest common substitute but is more tannic, so taste before adding all the sugar.
- ChillingTwo to three hours covered in the refrigerator is enough for the berries to take up colour and flavour without collapsing. Overnight leaves them slack and weeping.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and clouds on contact with juice. Superfine (caster) sugar sifted over at the table gives the same sparkle and dissolves cleanly.
- ServingSpoon rather than pour, into stemmed glasses or small chilled bowls, berries first and juice after. The recipe's six servings work out at roughly 1/2 cup each, the scale of a small opening course.
In menu books of the 1920s and 1930s, "cocktail" had two lives on the same page: the mixed drink, and the small sharp dish that opened a meal. Fruit and shellfish cocktails of this kind were already established as first courses before Prohibition, and they remained common in American entertaining literature through the 1920s, when a hostess still wanted something served cold in a stemmed glass at the start of dinner. Red currants are here for acid rather than sweetness; currant juice was one of several tart correctives a cook might reach for with bland summer fruit. The instruction to keep the raspberries whole suggests company food: the appeal is largely visual, and the recipe is otherwise three ingredients and a sieve.