Fruit Cocktails
1 qt. strawberries. 1 qt. sugar.
Wash and cap berries, sprinkle over sugar, let stand an hour; mash fine, put in cocktail glasses, serve with one spoon pineapple sherbet colored green. Cut balls from melon with vegetable scoop. Fill half cantaloupe, cut in points.
Pink raspberries in claret sirup.
Grapefruit in small pieces with marischino cherries and sirup. A little sherry makes it better.
This is really a set of five terse suggestions for a fruit first course rather than one recipe, written for a cook who already knows what a cocktail glass looks like. The strawberry version is the only one given in full; the rest are notes.
- A quart of berriesRoughly 1.5 lb, or about 4 cups hulled. "Cap" means hull — remove the green calyx.
- The sugar is not a typo, but it is a lotA quart of sugar to a quart of berries is equal volumes, about 1.75 lb. Heavy sugaring of this kind is common in period fruit recipes for drawing juice fast; a quarter to a third of that will macerate ripe fruit perfectly well in an hour at room temperature.
- Vegetable scoopA melon baller. Any small ice-cream-style scoop or a rounded measuring spoon will do the same work.
- "Cut in points"Most likely a zigzag or sawtooth edge cut into the rim of the cantaloupe half, so the shell serves as the glass; the phrase is terse enough that it could instead mean cutting the melon itself into points.
- Claret sirupClaret is dry red Bordeaux, so a claret sirup is a sugar syrup tinted and flavored with dry red wine. The recipe gives no proportions; a plain simple syrup thinned with claret to taste and chilled is a reasonable reconstruction, and any dry red stands in.
- MarischinoMrs. Wilson's spelling of maraschino. By 1920 the American product was brined and dyed rather than steeped in maraschino liqueur; if you use the modern kind, drain and rinse them or the grapefruit disappears under corn syrup.
- Pineapple sherbet, colored greenA garnish, not a base: one spoonful floated on the crushed strawberries. The green is pure period plate-styling and can be left out.
- Yield and serviceNo yield is stated; the strawberry mixture will fill several small cocktail glasses. All five versions want to go out very cold, so chill the fruit and the glasses; a fruit cocktail of this kind was served as a first course.
Mrs. Wilson's book dates from 1920, the first year of national Prohibition in the United States, which makes the closing line — "a little sherry makes it better" — and the claret syrup quietly telling: under the Volstead Act, liquor lawfully acquired before the Act could still be kept and drunk in a private home, and cookbooks of the early twenties went on printing such directions for some years afterwards. The fruit cocktail was a relatively new fashion, appearing at the head of American dinners alongside and in place of the older oyster or clam course in the 1900s and 1910s; the name borrowed the glass and the chilled, mixed, appetite-sharpening idea from the bar.