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Grape Fruit with Apricot Brandy
Prepare grape fruit for serving and add to each portion one-half tablespoon apricot brandy.
Barely a recipe and entirely dependent on technique: the whole thing is in how the fruit is cut and how cold it is served. A few notes on the wording and on the fruit itself.
- "Prepare grape fruit for serving"The book assumes you know the drill: halve crosswise, run a curved knife or grapefruit knife between the flesh and the peel, then free each segment from the membranes and lift out the fibrous core. Any seeds come out at the same time. Sectioning matters more than it sounds, since the point is that a spoon meets no membrane.
- Half a tablespoonOne and a half teaspoons per portion. It is a seasoning, not a soak; the fruit should taste faintly of apricot rather than of liqueur.
- What "apricot brandy" means hereIn American usage of the period this is a sweetened apricot liqueur (apricot-flavored brandy), not a dry apricot eau-de-vie. Buying a true unsweetened kernel or fruit distillate will give you something much sharper and drier than intended.
- SweeteningGrapefruit sold when this book was written were tarter and seedier than the Ruby Red and Star Ruby types on most shelves now. With modern sweet pink fruit, taste first; often none is needed.
- Cold is the methodServe well chilled; the recipe itself specifies no chilling time.
- ServingOne half per person, as a first course or breakfast opener in the manner of the period. Grapefruit shells sit unsteadily on a flat plate; use a shallow bowl or set them in cracked ice.
- A practical cautionGrapefruit interferes with a long list of prescription medications, statins among them. Worth knowing before offering it to guests as an appetizer course.
Grapefruit arrived on American tables late. Commercial Florida groves made it widely available only around the turn of the twentieth century, and it entered the meal as a novelty first course or breakfast fruit rather than as dessert, which is why it sits in the fruit chapter with instructions for cutting rather than cooking. The two-word spelling "grape fruit" in this entry is a period marker; the name is generally traced to the way the fruit hangs in clusters on the tree. Dressing the halves with a spoonful of liqueur belongs to the era's habit of giving a plain fruit course a hotel-dining-room flourish.