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Florida Grape Fruit
The fruit stores display a new clear-skinned lemon-colored fruit, about three times as large as an orange, and bearing a general resemblance to that fruit. Its flavor is sub-acid, but its juicy pulp is inclosed in a tough white membrane of intensely bitter taste; when this membrane is removed, the fruit is delicious. To prepare it for the table, cut the skin in sections and peel it off; separate the sections as you would those of an orange, and holding each one by the ends, break it open from the center, disclosing the pulp; tear this out of the bitter white membrane which covers the sections, carefully removing every part of it; keep the pulp as unbroken as possible, and put it into a deep dish with a plentiful sprinkling of fine sugar. Let it stand three or four hours, or over night, and then use the fruit. It is refreshing and wholesome, especially for a bilious temperament.
This is a preparation rather than a cooked dish: grapefruit sections stripped of pith and macerated in sugar. The instructions still work, though the fruit itself has changed more than the method.
- The fruit is now familiarWhat the book presents as a novelty from the fruit stores is ordinary grapefruit. The type in circulation then was seedy and sharply bitter; seedless white cultivars such as Marsh, and the later pink and red ones, are generally milder, so the laborious tearing-out described here can often be shortened.
- Skip the dissection if you likeThe whole point of the method is removing the bitter segment walls. With today's fruit it is easier to halve it and cut the sections free with a curved knife, or to supreme it as you would an orange with a paring knife, cutting the flesh away from each membrane wall.
- "Fine sugar"Caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves into the juice without grittiness. Granulated works but wants the longer standing time. Figure a tablespoon or so per grapefruit; more than that and you are eating syrup.
- Standing timeThree or four hours draws out plenty of juice and rounds off the acid. Overnight is fine but do it covered in the refrigerator, not on a counter as the original assumes; the cut fruit will also lose aroma and turn slightly bitter again after about a day.
- YieldOne grapefruit serves one generously or two modestly as a first course. Prepared this way it was commonly served at breakfast or to open a meal; the recipe itself calls for a deep dish, with a little of its own juice.
- On "wholesome for a bilious temperament"Nineteenth-century humoral shorthand, not medical advice. Worth noting the opposite modern concern: grapefruit interferes with the metabolism of a long list of prescription drugs, statins among them, so it is not a neutral fruit for everyone.
Grapefruit reached American tables late. It is generally traced to an eighteenth-century Caribbean cross between the sweet orange and the pomelo, and commercial planting in Florida did not get seriously underway until the 1880s and 1890s, which is exactly why a household book of this period introduces it as "a new clear-skinned lemon-colored fruit" and explains at length what it looks like before saying what to do with it. The heavy sugaring and the long macerating reflect the fruit of the time, which was pithier and more bitter than anything sold now; the sweeter pink and red varieties that made grapefruit a breakfast staple came out of Texas and Florida groves in the twentieth century. The closing claim about the bilious temperament belongs to an older tradition of treating fruit as mildly medicinal, a habit of mind that can be found in American cookbooks of the era.