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Grape Fruit with Sherry
Prepare grape fruit for serving, add to each portion one tablespoon Sherry wine, and let stand one hour in ice box or cold place.
A first-course fruit from the era when grapefruit was still a novelty at American breakfast tables. The whole dish rests on how the fruit is cut and how cold it gets.
- "Prepare grape fruit for serving"The recipe assumes a preparation given elsewhere. Period practice was to halve the fruit crosswise, loosen the sections from the membrane, and remove the tough core and seeds, so that what remains is loose sections sitting in their own juice rather than a half you have to fight with a spoon.
- One tablespoon per portionA portion here is presumably half a grapefruit, though the recipe does not say so. Any dry to medium Sherry works; an amontillado suits the fruit better than a sweet cream Sherry, which can turn the dish cloying.
- The hour of standing is the pointThis is not marination for flavour transfer so much as chilling. The wine and juice need to be genuinely cold, so an hour in the refrigerator is a minimum rather than a target; two or three does no harm.
- "Ice box or cold place"An icebox generally ran warmer than a modern refrigerator, commonly somewhere around 50F and varying with the ice supply. Nothing here suffers from the extra cold, so use the fridge without adjustment.
- Sugar is not called forGrapefruit of the period was probably sharper than the sweet red and pink varieties common today, which came later. If your fruit is sweet, the Sherry may be all it needs; with a tart white, a scant teaspoon of sugar per half dissolved in the wine would not be out of keeping with other fruit entries in the book.
- ServingServe in the shell, or in a shallow glass or on a small plate, with the juice. Entries of this kind were generally treated as an opening fruit course at breakfast or luncheon rather than as a dessert.
Grapefruit reached American tables late; it was still being planted commercially in Florida and Texas in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s often spelled it as two words, as here, and felt obliged to explain how to cut it. Its arrival coincided with the fashion for opening a formal breakfast or luncheon with a chilled fruit course rather than moving straight to eggs and meat, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes a run of such entries to melons, oranges and grapefruit dressed with wine, sugar or maraschino. The Sherry version belongs to that genteel table, a table that Prohibition, in force from 1920, would shortly rearrange.