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Apple and Orange Salad
Fine juicy apples with a slightly acid flavor, cut in dice and mingled with orange pulp, make a delicious salad.
Add half a cup of Maraschino cherries.
A two-sentence fruit salad from the era when "salad" could mean nothing more than cut fruit in a bowl. Almost everything is left to the cook, so the choices below are the whole job.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given beyond the cherries. Equal volumes of diced apple and orange segments, roughly two of each for four servings, balances the half cup of cherries without letting them dominate.
- "Slightly acid" applesThe book means a tart, firm eating apple, not a cooking apple that collapses. Granny Smith, Braeburn, Pink Lady or a good russet all hold their dice; Red Delicious and most soft supermarket apples turn to mush and taste of nothing against the orange.
- Orange pulpThis is the segments freed from membrane and pith, not juice. Supreme the oranges with a knife over a bowl so the juice is caught, then use that juice on the apple.
- The hinge: keep the apple from browningCut the apple last and turn it immediately in the caught orange juice or a little lemon juice. Diced apple left standing for even ten minutes goes brown at the edges and the salad looks tired before it reaches the table.
- Maraschino cherriesIn this period the name could still mean marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, closer to a cocktail cherry, though cheaper dyed and syrup-packed imitations were already common. Modern dyed cherries will work but are much sweeter; drain them well, or substitute good brandied or Luxardo-style cherries for something nearer the older article.
- DressingNone is called for, and none is needed if the fruit is juicy. If you want one, a spoonful of the cherry syrup loosened with orange juice suits it better than a boiled or mayonnaise dressing.
- ServingServes about four at the proportions suggested above; the recipe itself gives no yield. Chill thirty minutes and serve in glass dishes or on crisp lettuce leaves, a common presentation for fruit salads of the period.
Fruit "salads" of this kind spread in American household cookery in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as refrigerated rail transport and Florida and California citrus made oranges more widely available in winter. Magazines and cookbooks of the period filed such dishes alongside chicken and lobster salads, the category being loose enough to take cold fruit as readily as cold meat. The maraschino cherry does the work that a dressing would elsewhere: it supplies sweetness, color and a whiff of the fashionable, maraschino being a Dalmatian cherry liqueur that American cooks were most likely to meet through bottled cocktail fruit. Recipes as brief as this are not unusual in the period's cookbooks, which often assumed a reader who needed only the idea.