National Fruit Cocktail Day was Thursday, which provided a good a reason as any to dive into the history of the staple of school lunches everywhere, which was invented in San Jose during the heyday of the Valley of Heart’s Delight.

• The Ainsley cannery in Campbell sold a “fruit salad” under the Golden Morn brand starting in 1893, but the 1930 creation of fruit cocktail is credited to Herbert Gray of Barron-Gray Packing Co., which was on South Fifth and Martha streets in San Jose. California Packing Corp. — aka Calpak — first marketed fruit cocktail under its Del Monte brand in 1938, and Del Monte Plant No. 3 on Auzerais Avenue produced fruit cocktail from the 1940s until it was shuttered in 1999.

The Libby’s water tank in Sunnyvale. (Photograph courtesy of Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum) 

But there’s a wrinkle: Some sources say the combination of diced pears, peaches and pineapple, along with grapes and cherries was created by UC Berkeley food scientist William V. Cruess. So I turned to the best fruit cocktail expert I know: Jim Zetterquist, president of the California Pioneers of Santa Clara County. He worked in the canneries part-time as a teenager and full-time after he got out of college, and formed the Fruit Cocktail Club in 1995 with former Mayfair Packing President Joe Melehan and others to preserve and share the history of the valley’s canneries.

“It could be possible,” Zettequist said of the Cruess claim. “The National Canners Association out of Oakland had a close relationship with UC, so it could be possible that he was at Berkeley doing experiments in what could be canned and recanned. But Barron-Gray was the first cannery to sell fruit cocktail.”

Verdict: Berkeley has enough credits; San Jose gets to keep this one.

• There’s a long-running belief that fruit cocktail was made of slop that fell onto the floors of canneries. “Anybody under the age of 80 who says that is exaggerating,” Zetterquist says. The truth is that fruit cocktail originally was made of bruised or less attractive pieces of fruit that couldn’t be sold as pear halves or peach halves. “They put the smaller pieces together into fruit cocktail and then started dicing them so it looked like it was meant to be that way,” Zetterquist said. “But it wasn’t slop.”

In fact, grapes that weren’t high-quality enough for fruit cocktail were sent to Gallo, he said, to be crushed into wine.

• The word “cocktail” in the name has led some to believe the fruit is — or was once — packed in booze. Nope. This is more like a shrimp cocktail in meaning, though Zetterquist says he’s heard of people making an alcoholic dessert by pouring a little brandy over the fruit cocktail. And there are recipes online that use fruit cocktail as the base for fermenting “prison wine,” aka “pruno.” We’ll just take your word on how that works out.

• Sunnyvale holds claim to the world’s largest fruit cocktail can, a water tank on the site of the old Libby’s plant on California Avenue near Mathilda. The company painted it in the 1970s to resemble one of its fruit cocktail cans, and while the cannery itself closed in 1985, was torn down and replaced by an office park, the tower survives as a 150-foot high heritage landmark. Locals wouldn’t let the visible connection to the valley’s agricultural history be swept away, and the 25-foot tank was repainted by artist Anita Kaplan as a replica of one of Libby’s earliest fruit cocktail labels — then marketed as “Fresh Fruit for Salads.”

• Fruit cocktail got a boost in the post-World War II era as a “healthy” way for families to get fruit, especially in areas where fresh fruit wasn’t plentiful. But by today’s standards, the health benefits of yesteryear may have been a little dodgy. In addition to having the diced fruit soaked in heavy syrup, Zetterquist said the canneries’ old processing equipment in the 1950s and ’60s was iron coated with lead-based paint — a “scientific peeling” method involved soaking fruit in caustic lye. And the cherries got their neon color from red dye No. 2, which was banned in the United States in 1977 on the belief it was carcinogenic.

So, you can feel free to enjoy the canned delicacy as a tasty bit of Santa Clara Valley history — and take comfort that it’s probably a lot healthier than it was in the “good old days.”