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Strawberry-And-Pineapple Cocktail
1 cup orange-juice
Sugar
⅓ cup lemon-juice
1 cup strawberries
1 cup diced pineapple
Combine the orange- and lemon-juice sweetened to taste, keeping the mixture rather tart. Place on ice. Wash and drain the strawberries and hull them. At serving time cut the berries into halves (except six large ones), mix them with the pineapple, place in glasses and cover with the fruit-juice. One large, perfect berry set on a tiny circle of pineapple may decorate the top of each cocktail.
A no-cook fruit cup that depends almost entirely on temperature and balance. Everything should be very cold and the juice should stay sharp.
- YieldThe instruction to hold back six large berries suggests six servings. Each glass gets roughly a third of a cup of fruit under about three tablespoons of juice.
- Keep it tartThe hinge of the dish. A third of a cup of lemon juice to a cup of orange is a deliberately sharp ratio, and sugar is listed without quantity so you can stop early. Start with a tablespoon, stir until dissolved, taste cold — chilled liquid reads less sweet than warm.
- "Cocktail" means no alcohol hereIn this period a cocktail of this kind is a small tart first course served in a stemmed glass, like an oyster or grapefruit cocktail. Nothing is added to the fruit.
- PineappleThe recipe says only "diced," cut small. Canned pineapple works but is sweeter, so cut the sugar back accordingly; drain it well or the syrup will slacken the juice.
- "Place on ice"Chill the sweetened juice thoroughly before serving. The phrase most likely means setting the bowl in the icebox rather than adding ice to the juice, which would dilute it.
- Assemble at the last minuteThe recipe is explicit about cutting the berries at serving time. Halved strawberries sitting in acidic juice soon go pale and limp.
- GlassesThe recipe says only "glasses"; stemmed sherbet or coupe glasses, chilled, suit it. A shallow bowl set in a larger dish of crushed ice is one option if you want it.
Fruit cocktails as a first course belong to the early twentieth-century American dinner, where the old heavy soup-or-oyster opening was giving way to something light, cold and acidic meant to sharpen the appetite rather than blunt it. Grapefruit and oyster cocktails came first; fresh fruit versions like this one spread as citrus and pineapple became more reliably available outside their growing seasons. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its household books for a middle-class readership learning to serve courses at home, and the little decorative touch here — one perfect berry balanced on a disc of pineapple — suggests, though one can only infer it, that presentation was thought a skill a housewife could be taught in a paragraph.