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Fresh Fruit Salads
See chapter on Salads; also chapter on Cold Desserts.
GRAPEFRUIT-Cut in halves crosswise. Separate pulp from skin with sharp-pointed knife and with a pair of scissors remove tough center portion. Fill this cavity with sugar. Garnish with Maraschino cherries.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but a fair record of how grapefruit was served at the start of the twentieth century, when it arrived at table as a first course rather than a breakfast afterthought. Two details do the work: how the fruit is cut and how much sugar it gets.
- The cross-referenceThe first line points to other chapters in the same book rather than giving a formula. What follows is the entire instruction: a grapefruit half, loosened, cored, sugared and garnished.
- Cutting crosswiseHalving across the equator, not through the stem end, is what exposes each segment in cross-section so the pulp can be freed with a knife. Run the blade around the inside of the peel first, then along both sides of every membrane wall.
- The tough center portionThis is the fibrous core and the pithy tips of the membranes where they meet in the middle. Scissors are genuinely the right tool; a knife tends to tear the segments loose along with it.
- How much sugar"Fill this cavity" is roughly a teaspoon to a tablespoon of granulated sugar, depending on the fruit. Early-1900s grapefruit ran considerably more bitter and sour than modern Ruby Red or Star Ruby, which often need no sugar at all.
- Let it standSugar added at the last moment sits in a gritty heap. Sugar the halves and chill them 30 minutes to an hour so the sugar dissolves into the juice pooling in the center.
- Maraschino cherriesThe garnish of the period could be a cherry preserved in maraschino liqueur, firm and faintly bitter, though imitation versions -- brined, dyed and artificially flavoured -- were already on sale in America by this time. The bright red corn-syrup cherry sold under that name today is a different product; a brandied or Luxardo-style cherry is closer to the older article.
- Yield and place in the mealYield -- One half per person. The recipe says nothing about how it was served; a sugared grapefruit half of this kind was commonly eaten as an opening course.
Grapefruit was still something of a novelty in American households when this book appeared. Commercial groves in Florida had only expanded in the 1880s and 1890s, and rail shipment of citrus made the fruit a winter luxury in northern cities, which may be part of why a general-purpose domestic manual like Butterick's bothered to explain how to cut one. The chilled, sugared half opening a formal meal was a fashion of the period, and the maraschino cherry set in the center is the same decorative impulse that put a cherry on every fruit cup and ice of the era. The bitterness the sugar was meant to correct has largely been bred out; the pink and red varieties that dominate today came out of grove mutations found in Florida and, later, Texas, the earliest recorded Florida pinks dating from within a few years of this recipe's printing.