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Raspberry Salad
Pick the raspberries, and examine each one for fear any insects should be lurking in the heart of the fruit. Pile them on a dish, and sprinkle a little finely-powdered sugar upon them. Pour over them a few spoonfuls of wine, brandy, liqueur, or even plain cream, and stir the salad when serving it, so that an equal proportion of sauce and sugar may be given to each guest. The salad will be improved if some other fruit, such as white or red currants or strawberries are mixed with the raspberries.
A dressed fruit dish rather than a cooked one, so the only real decisions are sugar, liquid and timing. The hinge is that raspberries collapse fast once sugared: dress them within minutes of serving, not in advance.
- Finely-powdered sugarIn a British book of this date this means sugar crushed and sifted fine at home, closest today to caster sugar. Icing sugar dissolves too fast and leaves a cloudy film on the fruit.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For 1 lb (450 g) raspberries, allow about 2 tablespoons caster sugar and 3-4 tablespoons of liquid. That serves four.
- The liquidA sweet wine such as Madeira, Marsala or Sauternes suits the fruit better than a dry one; brandy or an orange or raspberry liqueur should be used sparingly, a tablespoon or two, or it flattens the fruit's perfume. Plain cream is the mildest option and the one to choose if the raspberries are very ripe.
- Do not wash themThe recipe says nothing about rinsing, only about examining each berry for insects, and dry picking-over suits the fruit: raspberries are hollow and take up water, which dilutes the flavour and turns them to mush. Pick over them dry and discard any that are soft or greyish.
- TimingSugar draws juice out of raspberries within about ten minutes. If you want the pile to hold its shape, sugar and moisten it at the table. If you would rather have syrup, dress it half an hour ahead and let the juices run.
- Mixed fruitRedcurrants and whitecurrants need stripping from their stalks with a fork; they are sharp, so add a little more sugar. Strawberries should be hulled and quartered so they take the dressing at the same rate as the raspberries.
- ServingThe recipe suggests no accompaniment, but sponge fingers or macaroons go well with the dish and do the useful job of soaking up the wine and juice left behind.
This is among the simplest of the "fruit salad" preparations that fill late-Victorian dessert chapters, a category that then meant little more than raw fruit sugared and moistened with wine, spirit or cream, and served cold. Raspberries were a short-season summer fruit grown widely in British kitchen gardens and difficult to transport, which is why so many recipes of the period treat them raw and locally, or else preserve them as jam and vinegar. The instruction to inspect each berry for insects reflects genuine practice before commercial fruit growing and refrigerated transport: the raspberry beetle larva sits in the core of the fruit and cannot be washed out, so picking over the berries by hand answered a real problem. The suggestion to mix in currants or strawberries is the older kitchen logic of using whatever ripened at the same time, since all three fruits overlap in the British summer.