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To Serve the Guava Uncooked
Peel the fruit, selecting if possible the nearly seedless varieties, and where the seeds are virtually nil slice across the fruit and serve with sugar and cream or a little wine and spice with sugar. Where the seeds form an objectionable centre, slice lengthwise or halve after peeling and scrape or scoop away the seeds from the inner side before serving. The scooped-out halves of the larger varieties may be filled with chopped nuts, cocoanut shredded, candied fruits, whipped cream or meringue, the Kaki and orange juice, and innumerable other variations for special occasions.
This is an assembly rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on the fruit itself. The instructions assume a cook with access to several guava varieties, which is not how the fruit reaches most markets now.
- Ripeness is the hingeGuava must be fully ripe — fragrant, yielding to a thumb, the flesh soft rather than crisp. Underripe fruit is astringent and chalky and no amount of sugar or cream will fix it; hold hard fruit at room temperature for a few days before peeling.
- "Nearly seedless varieties"Common tropical pink and white guavas all carry a seedy core; the seeds are edible but hard enough to be unpleasant under the tooth. Depending on the shop, guava may be sold pink-fleshed or as the crisp green-skinned Thai/apple type; the latter is often described as having softer, sparser seeds. The author names no variety, so which fruit was meant is guesswork -- expect to scoop either way.
- KakiKaki is the Japanese persimmon. For the filling use a fully ripe soft-fleshed type (Hachiya) or a firm Fuyu diced small; unripe astringent persimmon is unpleasantly tannic and will clash badly with the cream.
- CocoanutFreshly grated coconut, not the sweetened desiccated flake sold for baking, which will overwhelm the fruit. Frozen grated coconut, thawed and drained, is a fair substitute.
- "A little wine and spice"No quantities are given. A tablespoon or so of sweet wine per serving is the sensible reading — Madeira, sherry or a light dessert wine — with a pinch of cinnamon or a scrape of nutmeg. Guava's own perfume is strong, so keep the spice under it.
- PeelingThe skin is thin and can be taken off with a vegetable peeler. Peeled guava browns slowly; a squeeze of lime holds the colour and sharpens the flavour, which is the one thing this treatment tends to lack.
- Meringue on raw fruitAn uncooked meringue filling means raw egg white sitting on cut fruit. Use pasteurised whites if the dish will not be eaten within the hour, or fill with whipped cream instead.
- YieldGuavas are usually small, commonly around two to four ounces, though the recipe's own reference to "the larger varieties" implies fruit well above that. Judge portions by the size of what you have: roughly two whole small fruit per person sliced, fewer if the halves are large enough to fill.
Guava is native to tropical America and was carried by Spanish and Portuguese ships to Asia and the Pacific so early and so successfully that it grows wild across much of the tropics and is treated as a local fruit in places thousands of miles from its origin. In English-language cookery it appears overwhelmingly as jelly, paste and preserve, because the fruit is heavy in pectin and travels far better cooked than fresh — guava jelly was a standard colonial export and a fixture of nineteenth-century grocers' lists. A page like this one, insisting that the fruit be eaten raw and dressed only with sugar, cream or wine, belongs to a genre of fruit books written to widen the American repertoire beyond the preserving kettle. The suggested fillings — shredded coconut, candied fruit, chopped nuts, persimmon and orange juice — are the standard vocabulary of the period's stuffed-fruit and salad courses.