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Grape Fruit with Sloe Gin
Prepare grape fruit for serving and add to each portion one-half tablespoon sloe gin.
Two lines of instruction that assume you already know how a grapefruit was sent to table in 1900. The work is all in the fruit; the gin is a finishing spoonful.
- "Prepare grape fruit for serving"In period cookery this generally means halving the fruit across the segments, cutting round the core and lifting it out, then running a curved knife between each section and its membrane so the flesh comes free with a spoon. Preparing it an hour ahead and chilling lets the fruit release juice into the shell.
- The measureHalf a tablespoon is 1.5 teaspoons, about 7 ml, per half grapefruit. It is a scenting of the fruit rather than a drink, and doubling it turns the dish soupy and sweet.
- Sloe gin then and nowSloe gin is gin steeped with blackthorn fruit (Prunus spinosa) and sugar. Modern bottlings vary widely and some are as low as 15 percent alcohol and quite candied; period versions may well have been drier and stronger, though that is hard to pin down. If yours is very sweet, skip any added sugar on the fruit entirely.
- Grapefruit has changedTurn-of-the-century grapefruit was seedy, thick-pithed and sharply bitter; the sugar in most old recipes for it is a corrective. Modern Ruby Red and Star Ruby are markedly sweeter and need little or nothing.
- ServingThis was a first course, served very cold, sometimes in a bowl of cracked ice. One half-fruit per person; a grapefruit spoon with a serrated tip is worth having if you make it often.
- A practical noteGrapefruit interferes with a long list of common medications, statins among them. Worth knowing before you set it in front of guests as an opener.
The cookbooks of the period carry a whole cluster of these grapefruit variations with sherry, with maraschino, with mint because grapefruit was still something of a novelty on American tables. Florida groves had only made the fruit widely available in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it arrived as a fashionable breakfast and first-course item in hotels and private houses rather than as an everyday staple. Sloe gin was likewise a genteel bottle to keep in the house: an English cordial made by steeping the astringent autumn fruit of the blackthorn in gin with sugar, traditionally after the first frost, and long treated as a cold-weather restorative. Pairing the two is characteristic of the era's approach to fruit a short list of respectable ways to dress something plain, so a hostess could vary the opening course without varying the work.