Home › Village Receipts › Fruit Salad
Fruit Salad
Oranges, bananas, strawberries, cherries, pineapple, grapesany fruit in season-about one pound in all, one cup of chopped nuts; cut the fruit into small pieces, add the nuts and dressing. Dressing-Juice of two oranges, juice of three lemons, two eggs, one-half cup of sugar, one cup of cream. Beat the juice of the oranges and lemons with the eggs, add the sugar and boil until clear. Whip the cream and stir thoroughly into the mixture. Set aside to cool. Pour over the salad.
— Miss M. Edith White
A cooked citrus custard poured over cut fruit — closer to what later cookbooks call a fruit-salad dressing or "fruit dressing" than to anything savoury. The dressing is the whole difficulty; the salad itself is knife work.
- The hinge: cook the dressing gentlyOrange and lemon juice with whole eggs will scramble the moment it approaches a true boil. Cook it in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and loses its cloudy look — roughly 170–180F — then pull it off and strain it. "Boil until clear" describes the appearance, not a rolling boil.
- Cool it completely before the creamThe original says to whip the cream and stir it in, then set the mixture aside to cool. Fold the cream in only after the custard is cold, or it will deflate and the dressing will be thin. One cup of cream means heavy or whipping cream.
- Quantities and yieldOne pound of fruit plus a cup of nuts is a small amount by modern standards; figure four to six as a dessert course. The dressing is generous and you may not need all of it; keep any leftover covered and cold, and use it up quickly.
- Fruit choice"Any fruit in season" still holds, but skip watermelon and other very wet melons, which will thin the dressing. Toss bananas in a little of the citrus juice before adding them so they do not brown, and drain canned pineapple well.
- NutsWalnuts and hickory nuts were the nuts most easily had in the region; almonds, blanched, would have been the costlier choice. Toast them and add them at the last minute so they stay crisp.
- ServingDress the fruit just before it goes to table, or serve the dressing separately in a small pitcher. Sitting in it, the fruit weeps and the dressing loosens within the hour.
Community cookbooks of this period are full of fruit salads with cooked, cream-enriched dressings, and they suggest a moment when ingredients such as oranges, bananas and pineapple were arriving by rail and steamship; their appearance in a collection alongside strawberries and cherries "in season" says as much about freight as about cooking. The dressing itself is a lemon-and-orange custard of the type the era filed under "fruit salad dressing" he sise sweet counterpart to the boiled dressings then used for potato and chicken salad, before commercial mayonnaise made the uncooked kind ordinary. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, were a common convention of such books.