Home › Left-Over Fruit › Fruit Cocktail
Fruit Cocktail
Mix one-third cup of pineapple shredded with a fork, one-half cup of sliced orange-pulp and bananas, one cup berries or grape-fruit. Pour over a dressing made of one-third cup melted currant jelly, three tablespoonfuls lemon-juice, and onehalf cup of sugar. (Jelly and sugar are heated and lemon-juice added.) Chill and serve in glasses.
A Cream Filling for Cake Take one cup of thick corn-starch custard, and mix with it one-half cup of chopped stewed prunes, drained very dry, and add a few chopped walnuts.
Emergency Salad (from Fruit and Nuts) Cut a few bits of cheese into neat cubes. Chop six or eight olives. Break a few English walnuts in suitable-sized pieces. Remove the skin and seeds from a bunch of white grapes, if at hand.
Slice a banana or orange. Cut one or two small sweet pickles in thin slivers. Mix all lightly together. Take four fair red apples. Polish them well, cut a thick slice from the stem end and take out the core and most of the apple part, so as to form a cup. Mix the salad with a little mayonnaise, and serve in the apples, replacing the slice on top. 4 Fruit Soufflé cup cooked and strained fruit-pulp peach, apricot, prune, or quince Whites 3 eggs Enough sugar to sweeten Prepare pulp from canned or stewed fruit; add sugar if necessary; if too sweet, lemon-juice. Beat whites of eggs stiff, add gradually fruit-pulp, and beat until all has been put in. Turn into buttered molds, having them three-fourths full. Place in pan of hot water and bake in slow oven until firm.
Serve with soft custard.
Four short left-over formulas run together in the original typesetting: a fruit cocktail, a cake filling, a stuffed-apple salad, and a baked fruit soufflé. Each stands alone, and the quantities are loose by design — the point of the book is to use what is already in the icebox.
- Missing quantity in the souffléThe ingredient line reads "cup cooked and strained fruit-pulp" with the number lost in printing. Comparable fruit soufflés of the period use about a cup of pulp to three whites, which is the safest reading; noticeably less pulp will give a drier, foamier result.
- Slow ovenFor the soufflé, 300–325F. In a water bath, individual buttered molds three-quarters full will be firm in 30–40 minutes; the centers should barely tremble.
- The water bath is not optionalThe water bath -- The recipe specifies a pan of hot water, and it is worth following: direct oven heat tends to set the outside of the mold before the center is warm, and the soufflé is more likely to weep. Hot rather than boiling water, part-way up the molds.
- Currant jelly dressingHeat the jelly with the sugar only until both are liquid, then take it off the heat before adding lemon juice — prolonged boiling drives the syrup toward candy stage and it will set hard on the cold fruit. Half a cup of sugar on top of jelly is very sweet by current taste; a quarter cup is enough for most fruit.
- "Thick corn-starch custard"A milk-and-cornstarch custard cooked until it mounds on the spoon; period versions may or may not include egg, and the result is close to what would now be called pastry cream. Drain the stewed prunes very thoroughly, as the recipe insists, or the filling will loosen and run out of the cake.
- Apple cupsRub the hollowed apples and the cut slices with lemon juice at once. Without it they brown within minutes and the salad looks tired before it reaches the table.
- Sweet pickles with fruitNot an error. Sweet cucumber pickle turns up in fruit and cheese salads of this period for acid and bite; a sliver or two of cornichon or bread-and-butter pickle does the same work if that combination is unfamiliar.
- YieldThe cocktail dressing suits about two cups of prepared fruit, or four small glasses. The salad fills four apples. The soufflé serves three to four in ramekins; the cake filling is enough for one two-layer cake.
Books of left-overs proliferated in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the First World War, when household economy was a moral as much as a financial matter and iceboxes made it possible to keep yesterday's stewed fruit worth using. The fruit cocktail here belongs to the moment when "cocktail" was migrating from the bar to the first course: chilled fruit or oysters in a stemmed glass, dressed rather than sauced, served as the opening of a meal. Canned pineapple — listed casually as though always to hand — was a relatively recent convenience, Hawaiian pineapple canning having expanded rapidly in the 1900s. The "Emergency Salad" is the most revealing entry: cheese ends, a few olives, a lone banana and a stray pickle, assembled into something presentable inside hollowed apples. The stuffed-fruit-cup service was a hallmark of the period's ladies' luncheon, and the book's contribution is to show that the same effect could be had from scraps.