National Fruit Cocktail Day

Pink Sherbet Photography / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

May 13th is National Fruit Cocktail Day in the United States.

Fruit cocktail most often refers to a type of fruit salad that is typically bought canned. Fruit salad is a sweet dish served chilled that consists of chopped fresh fruit that is mixed together, often with such as lemon juice to delay such as apples from turning brown, which they do when exposed to air. Pretty much any fruit can be added to a fruit salad.

Fruit cocktail gains its name, not because it's a cocktail, but from the other definition of the word, which refers to an appetiser created by combining pieces of food such as fruit or seafood. In the United States, in order for a canned food to be called fruit cocktail, it must have specific percentage distributions of diced yellow peaches, pears and pineapple, whole seedless grapes and cherry halves, which must be any light sweet or artificially coloured red. These are pretty specific. This is then tinned with a syrup. Of course, the same dish can be made by simply using fresh fruit.