Plum Salads
Greengages make one of the prettiest of fruit salads. They may be used with bananas-halved or cubed-with good effect. Sprinkle powdered sugar over and let stand an hour or under before serving, or marinate in olive oil, flavoured with a cordial or liqueur, or use the cordial alone, serving with whipped cream. (See Introductory Recipes for Fruit Salads.)
A sketch rather than a formula, in the manner of turn-of-the-century fruit-salad chapters: the writer assumes you know how much sugar to sprinkle and how long an hour is. A few of the terms and one of the dressings need translating.
- GreengagesA small green-gold plum, sweeter and less acid than a purple plum, in season for a short window in late summer. If you cannot find them, use ripe Mirabelles or a sweet yellow plum; a red-fleshed plum will bleed and destroy the pale colour the recipe is after.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period this usually means finely ground granulated sugar — what is now sold as caster or superfine — not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar. Superfine dissolves into the fruit juices without clouding them.
- The olive oil dressingNot an error. Oil-dressed fruit salads were a real fashion in early twentieth-century service, treated as a cousin of the savoury salad. Use a mild, fresh oil, barely a tablespoon or two for a pound of fruit, or the flavour will dominate.
- CordialHere a sweet flavouring liqueur — kirsch, maraschino, curaçao — not the non-alcoholic fruit squash the word means in modern British usage. A tablespoon or two per pound of fruit is enough.
- Maceration timeThe recipe caps the standing time at "an hour or under." Sugared plums release juice quickly and soften if left much longer; the bananas soften sooner still.
- BananasCut them last and toss them in the sugar and cordial immediately, or they will brown before the plums have given up any juice. A little lemon juice in the mixture helps, though the original does not call for it.
- Stones and skinsHalve and stone the greengages but leave the skins on — they carry most of the colour, and the flesh of a ripe gage is too soft to peel neatly.
- YieldNo quantities are given. A pound of greengages with two bananas serves four to six as a dessert course.
The greengage takes its English name from Sir William Gage, whose family is generally credited with introducing the plum to England in the early eighteenth century from France, where it was and is called the Reine Claude after Claude of France. Fruit-salad chapters like this one belong to a moment when fresh fruit desserts were being promoted as lighter and more wholesome than the heavy puddings of the previous generation, and when the fashionable table borrowed freely from savoury salad technique — hence the olive oil, which reads oddly now but sat comfortably alongside the whipped cream and the liqueur. The cross-reference to "Introductory Recipes for Fruit Salads" is typical of the format: the book teaches a few base dressings once and then lists fruit after fruit, expecting the cook to combine the two.