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Orange and Banana Salad
Prepare and arrange the fruit as in the preceding recipe, but, instead of custard, pour over the oranges and bananas some whipped cream, sweetened and flavoured to taste.
A variation entry that assumes you have the preceding fruit-salad recipe in front of you: oranges peeled to the flesh and sliced or segmented, bananas sliced, the two layered with sugar. Only the topping changes.
- Pith and membranePeriod fruit salads commonly call for oranges pared to the flesh, the peel and white pith taken off with a knife and the segments freed from their membrane, or the fruit sliced across into rounds. Pith left on tends to taste bitter under sweetened cream.
- Bananas discolourSlice them last and turn them in a little of the orange juice. Cut bananas darken quickly, and once the cream is on there is little to be done about it.
- "Sweetened to taste"For 300 ml (about 1¼ cups) double or heavy cream, 1–2 tablespoons of caster sugar is the usual range. Whip to soft peaks only; stiff cream sits on the fruit as a lid instead of settling into it.
- Period flavouringsFlavourings of the period for sweetened cream include vanilla, orange-flower water, a spoonful of maraschino, curaçao or brandy, or a little grated orange rind. A teaspoon of liqueur is plenty for that quantity of cream.
- Cream then and nowModern double cream (around 48% fat) whips fast and overwhips faster; US heavy cream at around 36% is the gentler option.
- Assemble lateCream drawn over cut oranges begins to thin and weep from the fruit juice within an hour or two. Chill the fruit and the cream separately and combine shortly before it goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a guide, four oranges and three bananas with the cream quantity above would serve four to six as a light dessert course.
Cassell's ran this as one of a run of interchangeable fruit-salad entries, each differing only in the sauce — custard in one, whipped cream in the next — which is how a dictionary-format cookery book handled variations without reprinting the whole method. The appearance of bananas alongside oranges may say something about the book's date: bananas are generally said to have been a rarity in British kitchens for much of the nineteenth century, becoming more common as refrigerated steamship traffic developed in the closing decades of the century. Sweetened fruit under cream or custard belongs to the older tradition of the macédoine, and its place in "The Principles of Cookery" reflects the period's view that a well-made fruit dish was a matter of correct preparation — peeling, paring, arranging — rather than of cooking at all.