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Fruit Cocktail
Take Havana grape fruit, prepare carefully, removing all the tough particles, and taking the tender part and juice and mixing with a little cracked ice, six cherries, three tablespoonfuls of Santa Cruz rum and sweeten to taste. Prepare the grape fruit shells and place on ice until ready to serve. Place all on ice and when ready to serve, mix well and serve in the grape fruit shells. Very appetizing.
A grapefruit cup served in its own shell, with rum. The work is all in the segmenting, and the quantities are for a shared serving rather than one glass.
- Havana grapefruitMost likely fruit shipped from Cuba, which along with Florida supplied the Northern markets in this period; the name appears to have signalled desirable eating quality rather than a defined variety. Any ordinary grapefruit works; a Ruby Red is sweeter than the white fruit the writer would have had and will need less sugar.
- "Removing all the tough particles"This is the hinge. Halve the fruit, cut around each segment inside its membrane and lift the flesh out clean, discarding every scrap of white pith and the tough segment walls. Grapefruit membrane turns bitter and stringy in a cold cup and nothing later in the recipe hides it.
- The shellsScrape the halved shells clean with a spoon without piercing the base, then chill them hard. A shell that has sat at room temperature turns the whole thing lukewarm within a minute of filling.
- Santa Cruz rumRum from Saint Croix in the Danish West Indies, then a standard bar item in the United States: dryish and lighter in body than Jamaican rum. A decent aged or gold rum stands in; heavy blackstrap molasses rum will dominate the fruit.
- Cracked iceCrack it rather than crushing to snow, which waters the juice down as it sits. Some of the drinking pleasure here is the fruit staying cold and only slightly diluted.
- CherriesProbably preserved maraschino or brandied cherries from a jar, though fresh fruit in season cannot be ruled out. Use good cocktail cherries and a spoonful of their syrup if you want; skip the bright red dyed sort.
- SweeteningSugar dissolves badly in something this cold. Use a simple syrup, added a teaspoon at a time and tasted, or the sugar will settle out in the bottom of the shells.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many grapefruit; the plural "shells" implies at least one fruit halved. Three tablespoons of rum and six cherries indicate a shared serving eaten with a spoon rather than a single drink.
Fruit cocktails of this kind were a fixture of American formal dining from the 1890s onward, when grapefruit went from an odd curiosity to a fashionable opening course, helped by the growth of Florida groves and the reliable refrigerated rail cars that brought both the fruit and the ice. The word cocktail had first belonged to the specific mixed drink, and the iced fruit cup borrowed it later: the two shared the name, and this recipe sits between them, spirituous enough to count as one and eaten with a spoon like the other. Note also that naming the fruit by port of origin and the rum by island was itself the recipe's claim to sophistication, in the years before Prohibition swept the rum out of American dining rooms.