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Grape Fruit
Cut the shaddock in halves and with a spoon remove the pulp. Drain the shells. Mixtures of sliced bananas and pineapples, oranges and cherries or other fruits are all delicious. Boil together some sugar and water until it spins a light thread; the quantity will depend upon the number of shaddocks used. Thin it with lemon, orange or grape fruit juice; pour hot over the fruit; allow it to stand until very cold and fill it into the shells.
A fruit salad served in hollowed citrus shells, held together by a light sugar syrup. The vagueness is deliberate — the book expects you to scale by eye — so the useful work is in fixing the syrup stage and the quantities.
- Shaddock and grapefruitThe recipe uses the two words interchangeably, as many books of the period did. A shaddock proper is the pomelo, a thick-pithed ancestor of the grapefruit; here it simply means the fruit you are hollowing out. Use grapefruit for shells that hold their shape.
- "Spins a light thread"That is the thread stage of sugar boiling, roughly 223-235F on a thermometer, with a light thread at the lower end of that range. A syrup of about 1 cup sugar to 1/2 cup water reaches it in a few minutes and is enough to dress the fruit from two to three grapefruit.
- Thin it, then cool itThread-stage syrup sets sticky as it cools, so the lemon, orange or grapefruit juice is structural rather than decorative. Add roughly a quarter cup of juice per cup of syrup, enough that it pours freely when cold.
- Hot syrup on soft fruitPouring boiling syrup over sliced bananas turns them to mush. Let the syrup drop below scalding before it meets anything softer than pineapple, or add bananas only at the moment of filling the shells.
- Working the shellsCut across the equator, run a curved grapefruit knife between the flesh and the pith, then lift the segments out with a spoon. Scrape away the loose membrane and drain the shells cut-side down; a thin slice off the base keeps them from rocking on the plate.
- The fruit has changedEarly American grapefruit such as the Duncan was seedy and sharply bitter, and varieties of that character were common when this book was written. Later fruit -- Marsh, Ruby, and the twentieth-century Star Ruby -- is sweeter and far less resinous, so taste before you sweeten and lean on the lemon juice to keep the syrup from cloying.
- Chilling"Stand until very cold" means several hours in the refrigerator. The syrup needs that time to draw juice from the fruit and thin itself into something closer to a light sauce.
- YieldOne half-shell per person as a first course or a light dessert; three grapefruit and about three cups of mixed fruit will serve six.
Grapefruit arrived on American breakfast and luncheon tables late, and this recipe catches it while it was still a novelty worth dressing up. The fruit is generally traced to an eighteenth-century Caribbean cross between the pomelo and the sweet orange, and the older name shaddock is traditionally said to honor a sea captain who carried pomelo seed to Barbados a of this era with more confidence than evidence. Commercial groves in Florida made the fruit widely available in American cities only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and the treatment here keeps that novelty in view: the hollowed shell, the spun syrup and the mixture of out-of-season fruits all mark it as a course meant to be looked at as much as eaten.