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Summer Fruit Salad
Take one or two kinds of freshly-gathered finely-flavoured fruit. Pick it, put it into a glass dish, and stir into it a dessert-spoonful of sherry, a dessert-spoonful of water, and three table-spoonfuls of powdered loaf sugar to each pint of fruit. Let it remain in a cool place for an hour or two, and serve with cream instead of a tart.
A maceration rather than a salad in the modern sense: sugar draws juice from the fruit and the sherry carries the aroma. The measurements are all by volume, so scale by the pint of prepared fruit.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. So each pint of fruit gets about two teaspoons of sherry and two of water.
- Powdered loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and crushed as needed; "powdered" here means finely crushed, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the closest match, and three tablespoons per pint of fruit is generously sweet by current taste wo if the fruit is ripe.
- A pint of fruitAn English pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2.5 cups of picked fruit or currants roughly 12 oz by weight for berries. American cooks working from a 16 fl oz pint should reduce the sugar and sherry slightly.
- Which sherryA dry or medium sherry fino or amontillado suits soft summer fruit. Cream sherry will push an already sweet dish over.
- The hinge: cool, not coldAn hour or two in a cool larder is enough to draw the juice without collapsing the fruit. Refrigerating overnight turns raspberries and strawberries to mush and mutes their scent; take the dish out twenty minutes before serving if it has been chilled.
- Fruit that worksRaspberries, strawberries, redcurrants, sliced peaches and stoned cherries all give juice readily. Firm apples and pears will not macerate in two hours and are better poached.
- The creamThe recipe says only "cream"; the likeliest reading is unwhipped pouring cream. Single or light cream poured over at the table is closer to the intent than a whipped topping.
- YieldA pint of fruit dressed this way serves three or four as a light dessert.
The closing phrase "instead of a tart" is the whole argument: raw, briefly sugared fruit offered as a summer alternative to a hot baked pudding, when a kitchen range in July was a misery. Loaf sugar, a common refined form in this period, came as a solid cone that the cook broke with sugar nippers and crushed in a mortar, which may be why recipes of the period so often specify it "powdered" as a distinct step. The splash of sherry is the same trick found in trifles and compotes of the era -- a small amount of fortified wine used less for alcohol than for the aromatic lift it gives soft fruit.