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Strawberry Cocktail
Slice five or six large strawberries into each glass and squeeze over them the juice of an orange. At serving time add a heaping teaspoon of powdered sugar and a tablespoon of shaved ice.
A fruit cocktail in the old sense: a small first course served in a stemmed glass, not a mixed drink. The whole thing is assembled per portion, and the sugar goes on last for a reason.
- Quantities are per glassFive or six berries and one orange serve one person. For six, plan on roughly two pints of strawberries and six oranges, adjusting for the size of the fruit.
- Powdered sugar meant something elseIn American usage of this period "powdered sugar" generally meant finely milled granulated sugar, closer to what is now sold as superfine or caster than to modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine, or granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a grinder, is the safer reading.
- Sugar at the last minuteThis is the hinge of the recipe. Sugar draws water out of sliced strawberries within minutes and leaves them limp and bleeding. Slice and juice ahead, chill, and sugar only as the glasses go to the table.
- Shaved ice, not cubesA tablespoon of shaved or finely crushed ice is meant to chill and lightly slush the juice without diluting it. Cubes will not do the same work; shave ice in a food processor or wrap cubes in a towel and crush them.
- The glassThe recipe specifies only a glass; anything with a stem and a wide mouth works, and the point is that the fruit shows.
- Berry choiceThis depends entirely on fruit that tastes of something. Underripe supermarket strawberries will need more sugar and still fall flat; hull and slice ripe fruit lengthwise so the slices sit well in the glass.
Fruit cocktails became a standard opening course in American entertaining in the first decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period carry pages of them — grapefruit, melon, orange and strawberry, dressed with citrus juice and sugar and served on ice. The borrowing of the word "cocktail" for a non-alcoholic first course is usually traced to exactly that: the shape of the service, a small chilled thing in a stemmed glass before the meal, transferred from the bar to the table. Such dishes lean heavily on what could be assembled in the pantry a few minutes before guests sat down. A strawberry cocktail asks for no cooking, no equipment beyond a knife and an ice shaver, and depends only on the fruit being in season — which in the era before year-round berries meant it announced late spring.