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Peach Cocktail
Fill the glasses with sliced peaches; cover with orange or lemon juice; sweeten to taste; add a little shaved ice and serve. Apricot and cherry cocktails may be made in the same way.
A fruit cup served as a first course, not a mixed drink — "cocktail" in early twentieth-century American menus most often meant chilled fruit or oysters set out before the soup. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the peaches.
- The hinge: ripe fruit, coldThere is nothing here to hide behind — no cooking, no spirit, no cream. Use peaches ripe enough to give at the seam and chill the fruit, the juice and the glasses thoroughly before assembling. A lukewarm fruit cocktail is a sad thing.
- PeelingMrs. Fryer says only "sliced." Ripe peaches will usually slip their skins after 30 seconds in boiling water and a plunge into ice water; some cooks find the skin unpleasant once the fruit is chilled.
- Citrus proportion"Cover with orange or lemon juice" is generous for lemon. Orange juice can genuinely cover the fruit; with lemon, about a tablespoon per glass is enough, or the acid flattens the peach. A mix of the two — mostly orange, a squeeze of lemon — works, though the recipe specifies one or the other.
- SweeteningGranulated sugar will sit gritty at the bottom of a cold glass. Sugar syrup (equal parts sugar and water, boiled a minute and cooled) dissolves at once; a tablespoon or two per glass is the range.
- Shaved iceShaved, not cubed — it chills instantly and does not clatter against the spoon. Add it at the last moment, as it will dilute the juice within a few minutes. Modern shortcut: chill the assembled glasses an hour and add only a spoonful of ice at service.
- Apricots and cherriesApricots want the same treatment but less sugar, being tarter. Cherries must be pitted and are better left whole; sliced sour cherries collapse into the juice.
- Glasses and yieldFruit cocktails of the period were often served in a stemmed sherbet or champagne saucer, sometimes set in cracked ice, though the recipe says only "glasses." Figure one medium peach per glass — about three glasses from a pound of fruit.
By 1900 the American "cocktail" had split in two: the mixed drink and the appetizer course that opened a formal dinner. Menus of the era list oyster cocktails, grapefruit cocktails and fruit cocktails interchangeably as the first item, and the fruit version was the safe choice for a temperance household or a ladies' luncheon — which is why it turns up in a cook book aimed at the home hostess rather than the bartender. Jane Eayre Fryer's loose-leaf format, with its removable pages meant to be shuffled into menus, suited exactly this kind of short assembly-only recipe. The canned mixture we now call fruit cocktail is often said to have borrowed the name later, from these fresh chilled first courses rather than the other way round.