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Currant Salad
Pick equal weights of white and red currants, strawberries, and cherries, and place them in alternate layers on a high dish. Strew a little white sugar on each layer, and pour over the whole some thick cream, or place little lumps of Devonshire cream at short distances from each other upon the fruit. Time, a quarter of an hour to prepare.
A fruit salad in the Victorian sense: fruit arranged in layers rather than tossed, served with cream. The whole thing depends on the fruit, so it is worth being fussy about ripeness and about drainage.
- White currantsRarely sold in shops now; look for them at farmers' markets in high summer, or substitute a second red currant layer, or gooseberries, for the pale tier. The pairing is chiefly for colour contrast in the dish, though white currants are usually a little less sharp than red.
- Stone the cherriesThe original gives no instruction about the stones. Pit them, and halve them if large, so the layers sit flat and the spoon goes through cleanly.
- Currants must be strippedRun the strigs through the tines of a fork to free the berries, then discard the stems. Do this over the bowl so nothing is lost.
- Sugar timingSugaring draws juice out fast. Layer and sugar no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before serving, or the currants collapse into a pink puddle at the bottom of the dish.
- "Thick cream"Meaning unwhipped double or heavy cream, poured. Devonshire (clotted) cream is the richer option and is sold in small jars; drop it in spoonfuls as directed rather than spreading it, so the fruit shows.
- "A high dish"A straight-sided glass bowl or footed compote shows the alternating layers, which is the entire visual argument for the recipe. A wide shallow bowl defeats it.
- QuantityNo weights are given beyond "equal weights," so scale to the dish you are filling.
Fruit "salads" of this kind sit in nineteenth-century cookery books alongside lettuce and lobster salads because the word then covered an assembled cold dish rather than anything necessarily savoury or dressed with vinegar. The recipe is essentially an English midsummer arrangement: red and white currants, strawberries and cherries all come ripe within the same few weeks, and a household with a kitchen garden would have had all four at once and no reason to cook them. Devonshire cream, the clotted cream of the West Country, already carried associations of luxury by this period, and its inclusion as an alternative to pouring cream marks the dish as a company one. Compilations of this sort borrowed freely from earlier English books, which is consistent with the very English fruit list and the "Time, a quarter of an hour" tag that closes so many entries of the period.