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Cherry Cocktail
Allow one dozen large cherries to each portion. Pit the cherries, sprinkle with chopped almonds and pour over them a tablespoon of strawberry juice mixed with a tablespoon of powdered sugar and a half teaspoon of lemon juice allowed to each dozen cherries. Chill and serve ice cold in cocktail glasses. Decorate the plate with two or three whole cherries, and a leaf or two.
A no-cook first course that depends entirely on the quality of the fruit and on being served genuinely cold. Two or three minutes of assembly, plus chilling time.
- No alcohol involved"Cocktail" here means a small, sharp opening course served in a stemmed glass, not a mixed drink. Nothing in the recipe is spirituous.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period powdered sugar usually means a fine granulated sugar, finer than table sugar but not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match and dissolves cleanly in the juice; confectioners' sugar will work but clouds the syrup.
- Strawberry juicePress ripe strawberries through a fine sieve and use the liquid; a tablespoon per portion means roughly two or three berries. Bottled strawberry syrup is far sweeter and will need the added sugar cut back or dropped entirely.
- The almondsSweet almonds, blanched and chopped fine. Do not substitute anything sold as bitter almond, and toast the nuts only if you want them to read as a garnish rather than a seasoning "into" the fruit.
- CherriesSweet cherries — Bing, Rainier or similar. Sour pie cherries will fight the sugar. A dozen large cherries is about 4 oz per serving, so a pound serves four.
- Pitting and bleedingPit over a bowl and add any escaping cherry juice to the dressing. A hand pitter keeps the fruit whole; halving them makes a fruit salad rather than a cocktail.
- ChillingThe recipe says only "Chill" and "serve ice cold", with no time given; an hour or so in the refrigerator is enough for the fruit to take up the syrup, and the glasses themselves are worth chilling. Left much longer the cherries will soften.
- The garnishThe whole cherries and "a leaf or two" were part of the presentation. The recipe does not say what leaf is meant, though cherry leaves would have been to hand in season; a mint leaf is the usual modern stand-in.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher, and general household books of its decade often opened the dinner menu with a fruit cocktail rather than soup. The word had migrated: by the 1900s American cookbooks used "cocktail" for a small, cold, tart first course served in a stemmed glass " grouped with oyster cocktail, grapefruit cocktail, fruit cocktail " with no drink involved. Cherries appear here as a seasonal fruit: sweet cherries were a late-June and July fruit with no year-round supply, and strawberry juice came from much the same few weeks. The canned "fruit cocktail" of mixed pears, peaches, grapes and cherries that later took over the name was a commercial product of the following decades.