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Grapefruit Strawberry Cocktail
Cut fruit in half and carefully remove the pulp, leaving the inner white skin as lining. Place these shells in cold water to keep firm. Mix equal quantities of grapefruit pulp and strawberries, sprinkle with sugar and add a little sherry or rum, if flavor of liquor is liked. At serving time, fill the shells with the mixture, placing large, handsome berries on top as decoration.
A first-course fruit cup from the era when grapefruit opened a formal dinner. The whole technique is in the shell: cut, empty, and chill so it holds its shape.
- Sectioning the grapefruit"Carefully remove the pulp" probably means lifting the segments out from between the membranes rather than scooping, though the book names no tool. The recipe is explicit that the inner white skin stays behind as a lining, which is what keeps the shell rigid.
- The cold-water soakA spell in cold water firms the shells and keeps the rims from curling. Drain them well before filling.
- Trim the baseThe book assumes it, but shave a thin slice off the bottom of each half so it sits level in the serving dish. A shallow bowl or a bed of crushed ice steadies it further.
- Sugar and timingSugar draws juice from both fruits within minutes. Macerate no more than an hour, chilled, or the strawberries slump; a tablespoon of sugar per two servings is plenty with modern sweet grapefruit.
- Grapefruit has changedButterick-era grapefruit was almost all seedy white varieties, sharply sour. Ruby Red and its descendants are considerably sweeter, so taste before adding sugar.
- The liquorThe recipe asks only for "a little" sherry or rum, if the flavor is liked; a teaspoon or two per serving keeps it a flavoring rather than a spirit course.
- Grapefruit and medicationGrapefruit interferes with a long list of common prescriptions, statins among them. Worth knowing before serving it as a fixed opening course to guests.
- YieldOne grapefruit gives two servings. Figure roughly a cup of hulled, halved strawberries per whole fruit to match the pulp volume.
Grapefruit as a breakfast or dinner-opening course was a relatively new habit when this book appeared: the fruit was barely grown commercially in Florida before the 1880s, and it took the spread of refrigerated rail freight to put it on northern tables at all. Serving it in its own shell, with a scalloped rim and a maraschino cherry or a few berries on top, was a familiar form, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s repeat it endlessly with variations in what fills it — orange, pineapple, mint, sherry. The splash of sherry or rum here marks the recipe as pre-Prohibition, and the fruit cocktail survived into the mid-century as a resolutely nonalcoholic thing.