Ambrosia
6 sweet Florida oranges. 1 cocoanut grated. 4 plantains (red bananas). 1/3 cup fine table Sherry wine. 1/4 cup lemon juice.
Bar sugar.
PROCESS: Peel the oranges, separate the sections, remove the tough membrane and seeds. Dispose a layer of orange pulp in bottom of shallow, glass, serving-dish, sprinkle with wine and lemon juice and sugar, strew with cocoanut and a layer of thinly sliced banana. Repeat until all ingredients are used, having a thick layer of cocoanut on top. The fruit should be piled in cone shape. Chill and serve with dainty cakes, macaroons, Anise wafers, etc.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — oranges and coconut appear only in the method — so treat this as a set of proportions rather than a fixed formula. Everything else is straightforward assembly work.
- The missing quantitiesFor four red bananas and 1½ cups of sherry, figure on 8 to 10 large oranges and the meat of one coconut, roughly 3 cups grated. The dish is built by layers, so exact amounts matter less than having enough coconut to finish with a thick top layer.
- "Plantains (red bananas)"These are red-skinned dessert bananas, not the starchy green cooking plantain sold under that name today. They are sweet, eaten raw, and slightly denser than a Cavendish. Ordinary yellow bananas, sliced thin and used at once, are the practical substitute.
- Bar sugarSuperfine or caster sugar — ground finer than granulated so it dissolves on contact with the fruit juice. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a food processor does the same job. Use it sparingly; the oranges and sherry carry most of the sweetness.
- CoconutThe original assumes fresh coconut, cracked and grated at home, which is moist and barely sweet. Packaged sweetened flake is much sweeter and drier; if you use it, cut the sugar back to almost nothing. Unsweetened frozen grated coconut is the closest modern match.
- The sherry"Fine table Sherry" points to a drinking sherry rather than cream or cooking sherry; a dry to medium one is the likeliest reading, though the book does not specify. A cup and a half across the whole dish is generous — the fruit will sit in a syrup of wine and juice, and half the amount is enough if you want less.
- Sectioning the orangesCut away peel and white pith with a knife, then free each segment from its membrane over a bowl so the juice is caught and goes into the dish. This is the tedious step and the one that decides whether the ambrosia is elegant or stringy.
- Chilling and timingThe recipe says only to chill. A couple of hours is generally enough for the flavours to marry; much longer and the sliced banana tends to darken and soften, so it is best assembled the same day you serve. The cone shape will slump as the fruit gives up juice.
- YieldOn the quantities suggested above, enough for roughly 8 to 10 served in small glass dishes with the macaroons or wafers the recipe names.
Ambrosia is an American dish, closely associated with the South, that appears in printed cookbooks from the 1860s and 1870s onward as oranges and grated coconut layered with sugar — the name borrowed from the food of the Greek gods and applied, with some cheerfulness, to a bowl of fruit. Its spread is usually linked to the growing winter supply of Florida citrus and imported whole coconuts. The additions in this version — sherry, lemon juice, red bananas — suggest a more elaborate company version rather than the plain oranges-and-coconut of household use, and the instruction to pile it in a cone and serve it with macaroons points to a dessert course rather than the holiday side dish ambrosia has largely become since.