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Fruit Salad
This pleasant dish can be made either with berries, such as strawberries, raspberries, and currants, or with sliced pineapple, peaches, apricots, bananas, oranges, etc. In either case the mode of preparation is the same. Arrange the fruit in layers in a deep glass bowl, sprinkling sugar over each layer. Just before serving pour half a pint of Madeira over, and a wineglass of Benedictine or Curacoa.
A late-Victorian macédoine that is really an assembly job: the only technique is layering and the only decision is when to add the alcohol. The quantities of spirit, however, are generous by modern standards.
- Half a pint of MadeiraCassell's is working in imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz — about a US cup and a quarter. Poured over a single bowlful that is a soaked salad rather than a dressed one; half the amount gives the flavour without the fruit swimming.
- A wineglassIn Victorian cookery books a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup). It is not the modern 6 oz stemmed glass.
- Benedictine and CuraçaoBoth are still made. Benedictine is a sweet herbal liqueur, Curaçao an orange one — the latter suits the citrus-and-stone-fruit version, the former the berries. Cointreau or Grand Marnier stand in for Curaçao readily enough.
- MadeiraChoose a medium style — Verdelho or Bual. Dry Sercial reads thin against sugared fruit, and the sweetest Malmsey plus layered sugar plus liqueur tips the whole thing into syrup.
- Sugar between the layersThe sugar is not just seasoning; it draws juice from the fruit and builds the light syrup the wine is later diluted into. Caster sugar dissolves best. Allow roughly a tablespoon per layer and taste the fruit first — many modern cultivated varieties, pineapple especially, have been bred sweeter than their nineteenth-century equivalents.
- TimingLayer and sugar the fruit an hour or two ahead and chill; the instruction to add the wine just before serving is the hinge. Alcohol added early firms and dulls soft fruit, and bananas in particular go grey and slack.
- Fruit that brownsBananas, peaches and apricots discolour once cut. Toss them in a little lemon juice before they go into the bowl, or add them last, immediately under the top layer.
- Yield and servingA deep glass bowl will take perhaps two to three pounds of prepared fruit, enough for six to eight, though the recipe gives no quantities. Serve in glass dishes with some of the pooled liquid spooned over, and plain cream or sponge fingers alongside.
"Fruit salad" in a book of this date sits alongside the French mac\a mixture of many things, traditionally said to be named after Alexander's polyglot empire, the same joke that gives us the vegetable macédoine. The glass bowl matters as much as the fruit: pressed and cut glass had become cheap enough for middle-class households to own a footed salad or trifle bowl, and a dish whose whole appeal is its visible layers only makes sense once the table can show them off. The liqueurs are period markers too. Benedictine, produced commercially at Fécamp from the 1860s and heavily advertised in Britain, and Curaçao, the orange-peel liqueur of the Dutch Caribbean trade, were both fashionable bottles for the sideboard, and Madeira, whose dominance in the English kitchen and at dessert belonged to the Georgian and early Victorian decades, was by this date much reduced in supply after the oidium and phylloxera outbreaks of the 1850s–70s. What Cassell's offers is a combination built on imported out-of-season fruit — pineapple and oranges among them.