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Grapefruit à La St. Patrick
1 ounce (2 tablespoons) gran- ¾ cup sugar ulated gelatin
1 cup ice-water
½ cup cold water
2 cups grapefruit pulp and
½ cup boiling water juice
Maraschino cherries
Fresh mint
Keep the grapefruit skins, in halves. Simmer a few sprigs of extracted. fresh mint in the boiling water until the flavor is Follow the standard directions for making jelly. When jelly is firm, cut it into cubes, pile the cubes in the grapefruit shells and garnish with sprigs of mint and cherries.
A straightforward gelatin dessert whose only real complications are the old gelatin measure and the missing "standard directions" the book assumes you have already read.
- The gelatin measureOne ounce of granulated gelatin is four modern envelopes (each ¼ oz, about 2¼ teaspoons). The recipe's parenthetical "2 tablespoons" understates it; go by weight, 1 oz / 28 g, which sets the roughly 4 cups of total liquid firm enough to cut into clean cubes.
- The standard directionsSoften the gelatin in the ½ cup cold water for 5 minutes, dissolve it completely in the ½ cup of hot mint infusion, stir in the sugar until no grains remain, then add the grapefruit and the ice-water. Undissolved gelatin is the usual cause of a cloudy or grainy set.
- The mint infusionSimmer the mint in the ½ cup boiling water, covered, or steep it off the heat, for roughly 10 minutes, then strain. Prolonged open simmering tends to drive off the volatile oils and can leave a flatter, hay-like flavour rather than a fresh one.
- Grapefruit pulpTwo cups of pulp and juice is about two to three medium grapefruit. Work over a bowl to catch the juice, remove all membrane and seeds, and taste before sweetening — modern ruby varieties are generally sweeter and less bitter than the Duncan-type white fruit of the period, so ¾ cup sugar may be more than you want.
- The shellsHalve the fruit crosswise, scoop it clean, and scrape out the loose white pith with a spoon so the cups sit flat and taste clean. Chill them while the jelly sets.
- Setting and cuttingPour into a shallow pan so the jelly is about an inch deep; it should set in about four hours and will cut more neatly after overnight chilling. Dip the knife in hot water between cuts for sharp cubes.
- YieldFour to six shells, served as a first course or a light dessert. The cubes soften at room temperature, so fill the shells just before serving.
Butterick published this in an era when grapefruit was still a slightly fashionable novelty on American tables — it had spread from Florida groves into city markets in the decades around 1900, first as a breakfast fruit eaten with sugar from the half shell. Granulated gelatin sold in packets had by then replaced the labor of boiling calves' feet, and cookbooks filled whole chapters with molded jellies and creams — the appeal, one imagines rather than documents, lying in an ingredient that was new, reliable and showed off a cook's neatness. The St. Patrick of the title is doing no more than supplying the green: mint in the jelly, mint and red cherries on top, a color scheme for a March 17th luncheon. Holiday-coded desserts of exactly this kind — a standard formula with a seasonal garnish and a saint's or president's name attached — seem to have been common enough in turn-of-the-century women's magazines, of which Butterick, a pattern company with a large magazine business, was very much a part.