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Grape-Fruit Cocktail
Cut the grape-fruit into halves, crosswise, and scoop out the pulp, rejecting the white inner skin as well as the seeds. Clean the shells; cut the edges with a sharp knife into scallops and throw them into cold water. Set the pulp on the ice. At serving time put a teaspoon of cracked ice in the bottom of each shell; fill with the pulp, mixed thoroughly with powdered sugar and white grapes, if desired; and place a maraschino cherry or bit of bright-colored jelly in the center of each. Lay on paper doilies or surround with bits of asparagus fern.
A first-course fruit cup dressed up in its own shell. Nothing here is difficult; the work is in the sectioning and the timing.
- Segmenting the pulpThe recipe says to scoop the pulp out; if you prefer, cut around each section with a curved grapefruit knife and lift the segments out whole. Pulp that has been mashed weeps juice and the finished shell turns watery.
- "Set the pulp on the ice"This means the icebox — refrigerate the segments, covered, until serving. An hour or two is plenty; longer and the membranes soften.
- Why the shells go into cold waterThe recipe does not say, but soaking would crisp the cut scallops and keep the edges from drying out. Drain them upside down on a towel just before filling.
- Powdered sugarA fine-ground sugar that dissolves without grit; modern confectioners' sugar will do. Common grapefruit varieties today are generally sweeter than the older seedy sorts such as Duncan, so start with about a teaspoon per half and taste.
- Cracked iceA teaspoon of ice in the bottom chills the fruit but melts into it. If you are serving indoors and promptly, chilled shells alone do the job without diluting the juice.
- White grapesMany white grapes of the period had seeds, so halve and pit them; seedless grapes need only halving, or leave them whole if small.
- Asparagus fernDecorative greenery of the period, and not something to eat. Any non-toxic garnish will serve, or skip it.
- YieldOne half per person as a starter. Figure one grapefruit for two people, and count on the fruit being sectioned no more than a few hours ahead.
Grapefruit was a novelty on American tables well into the early twentieth century — it moved from a Florida curiosity to a commercial crop only in the 1880s and 1890s, and for decades it was treated as a luxury fruit rather than a breakfast staple. Serving it as a "cocktail," the opening course of a formal meal, made a virtue of that expense: the scalloped shell, the maraschino cherry, the paper doily and the fern are all about presentation for guests. The word cocktail here carries no alcohol; by the 1900s it had been extended from mixed drinks to any small, sharp, appetite-opening first course, which is also how oyster cocktail and fruit cocktail got their names.