Home › Appetizers › Strawberry and Pineapple Cocktail
Strawberry and Pineapple Cocktail
Juice of three oranges and one lemon, sweetened to taste, keeping the mixture rather tart. Place on ice. Hull, wash and drain thoroughly some large, fine strawberries; also cut into dice several slices of pineapple. At serving time cut the berries into halves, mix them with the diced pineapple, place them 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 fruit cup rather than a drink, meant to be spooned from a stemmed glass at the start of dinner. The whole thing rests on cold fruit and juice that stays sharp.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none for the fruit. For six servings, figure about 1 lb strawberries and half a fresh pineapple, diced small; the juice of three oranges and one lemon comes to roughly 1 cup and is enough to cover that amount.
- Keep it tartThe instruction to keep the mixture "rather tart" is the hinge, and the recipe leaves the sugar to the cook. Start with no sugar at all, taste, and add a teaspoon at a time. Over-sweetened, the cocktail reads as dessert and defeats its purpose as an appetizer.
- Pineapple"Several slices" suggests a pineapple peeled and cut crosswise, though sliced canned pineapple was already on shelves and may be what was meant. Canned pineapple in syrup throws the balance sweet; if you use it, drain well and add extra lemon.
- Cut at the last minuteThe recipe halves the berries only at serving time for good reason. Cut strawberries weep and go slack within the hour, and the juice turns cloudy pink.
- "Place on ice"This means the icebox or a bowl set in cracked ice, not ice added to the juice. Chill the juice and the fruit separately and hard, at least two hours; the dish is served very cold and nothing else can rescue it.
- GlassesA small stemmed sherbet or champagne glass suits the dish, and such glasses were sometimes set in a larger bowl of shaved ice. Any small glass bowl will do, but keep the portion modest — three or four ounces.
- The garnishThe whole berry on a pineapple round needs the fruit cut to fit: a thin disc punched from a slice with a small round cutter, the berry balanced hull-side down.
The fruit cocktail arrived on American tables around the turn of the twentieth century as a first course, and is often said to have taken the place — and the glassware — of the oyster cocktail on menus where oysters were out of season or unwanted. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for middle-class housewives, was aiming squarely at the reader who wanted to lay a fashionable table without a professional cook, and a fruit cup was the cheapest possible way to give a dinner a formal opening. Fresh pineapple in such a book signals the period as much as anything: steamship traffic from the Caribbean and Florida had, by the 1900s, moved pineapple from a luxury centerpiece to something a careful household could buy. The word "cocktail" here carries no alcohol at all — it had already begun its drift toward meaning any small, sharp, appetite-opening thing served in a stemmed glass.