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Strawberry Salad
Take equal portions of strawberries and red and white currants. Pick them, place them in layers, and pile them on a dish. Sprinkle powdered sugar over them, and pour thick cream upon them. The cream and sugar should not be poured on the fruit till the last moment. If liked, other fruits, such as gooseberries, cherries, raspberries, etc., may be introduced into the salad.
An assembly rather than a recipe, and the few decisions it leaves open are the ones worth getting right.
- The hingeSugar and cream go on at the table, not in the kitchen. Sugar draws juice out of soft fruit within minutes and the strawberries collapse into a pink slush; the point of the dish is distinct layers still holding their shape.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period this generally means sugar ground or pounded fine, rather than modern confectioners' or icing sugar with its cornflour. Caster sugar is the closest substitute; icing sugar will go pasty against wet fruit.
- Thick creamUnwhipped double or heavy cream, poured, not spooned. Single or light cream runs straight to the bottom of the dish and does nothing.
- The currantsRed and white currants supply the sharpness and seedy bite against the strawberries, and hold their shape better in the pile. If you cannot get both, redcurrants alone work; frozen ones do not, as they weep on thawing.
- Picking"Pick them" means stripping currants from their strigs and hulling the strawberries. A dinner fork drawn down a currant strig clears it in one pass.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given at all. Roughly 500 g of mixed fruit in equal parts, with 150 ml of cream, serves four as a light course.
- Balance if you add more fruitGooseberries should be ripe dessert varieties; the hard green cooking sort is punishingly sour raw. Cherries should be stoned, or say so at the table.
"Salad" here carries its older, looser sense of things dressed and served cold rather than anything savoury, and the dish belongs to the brief English window -- roughly late June into July -- when strawberries and currants overlap in the same garden. Currants, both red and white, were a standard fixture of the Victorian kitchen garden and far more familiar to a nineteenth-century household than they are now; their retreat from most greengrocers owes a good deal to the fruit's unwillingness to travel, and in North America to twentieth-century restrictions on Ribes cultivation.