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Mixed Fruit Cocktails
Cut into small pieces as many different kinds of fruit as you have in the house; sweeten to taste and set on the ice to chill. At serving time fill the cocktail glasses and place a maraschino cherry or ripe strawberry on the top of each.
Fresh or canned pineapple is one of the most refreshing fruits for cocktails.
A recipe that is really a method, of the kind that assumes a fruit bowl and a cold larder. Two decisions carry it: how you sweeten, and how long it sits.
- "Set on the ice"This means the icebox, where a block of ice kept things at roughly 45-50F. Refrigerate 1 to 2 hours instead. Longer than about three hours and softer fruit slumps and weeps.
- Sweeten with syrup, not dry sugarGranulated sugar stirred into cut fruit draws out juice and slackens the texture. A simple syrup (equal sugar and water, boiled a minute and cooled) sweetens without pulling the fruit apart; start with 2 tablespoons per 4 cups of fruit.
- Choose fruit that holds its edgesPineapple, orange and grapefruit segments, grapes, melon, firm pears and apple all cut cleanly. Banana and raspberry disintegrate; add them at the last moment or leave them out.
- Guard against browningThe original says nothing about it. A tablespoon of lemon or orange juice tossed through apple and pear keeps them pale.
- Canned pineappleStill the most useful item here, and worth noting that canned pineapple is heat-treated, so it will not soften other fruit. Fresh pineapple contains an active enzyme; keep it away from gelatin if you extend this into a molded dish.
- Maraschino cherries have changedThe name originally meant Marasca-type cherries steeped in maraschino liqueur, though bleached, dyed and almond-flavored imitations were already widely sold in America by the early twentieth century; the modern supermarket jar is that imitation. A ripe strawberry, the alternative given, is the better garnish.
- Glasses and yieldA cocktail or coupe glass of the era held about 3 to 4 ounces. Four cups of prepared fruit will fill eight or more such glasses; drain off the accumulated juice so the fruit does not float.
Serving cut fruit as a first course was a novelty of the late nineteenth century that had become standard American entertaining practice by the time cook books like this one were sold. The name borrowed the glamour of the bar drink without the alcohol, which made it welcome at ladies' luncheons and, it is often said, still more so after 1920; the shape of the glass did the work the liquor used to. The confident mention of pineapple, "fresh or canned," marks the period precisely: Hawaiian canneries had made a tropical fruit into a pantry staple within a couple of decades, and canned pineapple appears in American recipes of the 1910s and 1920s with a frequency that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier.