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Mixed Fruit Cocktail
6 large oranges
Juice of I lemon
I banana
Sugar
2 slices pineapple
Slice off the tops of the oranges and scoop out the inside, being careful not to break the inside white skin of the orange-peel. Put the orange cups in a bowl of ice-water. Cut in small pieces the banana and pineapple, mix these with the orange pulp cut in small pieces and the lemon-juice, sweeten to taste, and then fill the orange shells. Set each one in a small bowl, filled with crushed ice. The mixed fruit pulp that remains after the orange skins have been filled may be kept in the refrigerator and served as sauce with ice-cream or used in any other way that circumstances suggest.
Fruit cocktails may be made from mixtures of almost any fruits, canned or fresh. As a rule, combinations of a sweet and a sour fruit are most piquant in flavor.
SOUPS
A simple assembly job whose only real technique is hollowing the oranges cleanly. The recipe gives no quantities beyond the fruit, so taste as you sweeten.
- Hollowing the shellsCut the top third off each orange, then run a grapefruit spoon or paring knife around inside the membrane to free the segments in one piece. The instruction to keep the white inner skin intact is what stops the shells collapsing or leaking; a torn shell is only good for the scrap bowl.
- The ice-water bathSoaking the empty shells firms the peel and keeps it from drying at the cut edge. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough, and they drain better cut-side down.
- "2 slices pineapple"Probably canned pineapple rings, though the recipe's own closing note allows either ("canned or fresh"); two rings cut about half an inch thick give roughly half a cup diced. Fresh pineapple works and is more acidic, so you may want slightly more sugar.
- SugarWith sweet modern navel oranges, start with a tablespoon of sugar for the whole mixture and add from there. Superfine sugar dissolves without grit; letting the mixture stand ten minutes in the refrigerator lets it draw juice and taste properly.
- The bananaCut it last and fold it in just before filling. It browns and softens quickly, which is also why the leftover pulp is better used the same day than kept long in the refrigerator.
- YieldSix oranges give six servings, with some mixed pulp left over. The original's suggestion to spoon that over ice cream is still the best use of it.
- ServingSmall bowls of crushed ice were the period's way of keeping a cocktail cold at table without dilution. A chilled shallow dish, or simply refrigerating the filled shells for half an hour, does the same work.
Fruit cocktails appear as a first course in American cookery in the years around 1900, and the borrowed name is the giveaway: "cocktail" carried its bar meaning first and was extended to any small, sharp, appetite-rousing thing served in a glass. It is often said that hostesses welcomed it as a temperance-friendly alternative to a spirit-based cocktail, but that is tradition rather than documented fact. The dish is aimed squarely at presentation over expense: six oranges and a few slices of pineapple, dressed up in their own shells and set on ice, produce something that reads as a formal course. The closing note that "combinations of a sweet and a sour fruit are most piquant" is a common rule of the period, and the growing supply of canned pineapple, with Hawaiian packing expanding after 1900, is part of what made such a dish possible outside of summer.