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Fruit Salad
Blanch the meat of two dozen English walnuts and break in pieces. Skin and seed two dozen white grapes, cut one pineapple in slices and slices in cubes.
Slice three bananas. Separate the sections of two large oranges and remove all skin. Arrange each in separate piles.
Pour over a dressing made of one-half cup of Madeira wine, one cup of sugar, two tablespoons of lemon juice and one-half cup of orange juice. Garnish with Maraschino cherries.
A composed fruit salad of the kind served in courses at turn-of-the-century dinners: the fruits are kept in separate piles rather than tossed, and the "dressing" is a sweet wine syrup poured over at the table. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredients behave differently now than they did then.
- Blanching the walnuts"Blanch the meat" means pouring boiling water over the shelled nuts and slipping off the papery brown skin, which is bitter and tannic. Two dozen walnuts in the shell gives roughly a cup of kernels; a cup of shelled halves is a fair substitute. Skip the blanching and the salad turns astringent against the sweet syrup.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, Juglans regia, as distinct from the American black walnut. Any supermarket walnut is what is meant.
- White grapes and seeding"White" means green table grapes. The instruction to seed tells us the grapes in question had seeds; with modern seedless grapes you only need to halve them. The skinning is worth doing if you have the patience, as it is what makes the grapes read as jewel-like rather than chewy.
- PineappleOne pineapple yields far more than this salad needs at four to six servings. Use half a medium fruit cut into half-inch cubes, and choose one that smells sweet at the base; underripe pineapple is aggressively acidic and will curdle the balance of the syrup.
- The Madeira syrupOne cup of sugar to half a cup of wine and roughly two-thirds cup of juice is very sweet by current taste. Warming the sugar with the citrus juice until it dissolves, then stirring in the Madeira off the heat, gives a syrup that pours cleanly instead of gritting at the bottom of the bowl. A medium-dry Madeira such as Verdelho suits it; cream sherry is a reasonable stand-in. The alcohol is not cooked off, so this is not a dish for children.
- Bananas lastSlice the bananas at the moment of assembly. They brown within minutes, and the acid in the dressing only slows it. Tossing the slices in a little of the lemon juice first helps.
- Maraschino cherriesIn this period the name still generally pointed to marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, darker and more bitter-edged than the bright red confection usually sold under the name now. Amarena cherries, or the liqueur-preserved cherries sold by Luxardo, are closer to the intent.
- Serving and yieldArrange the piles on a shallow glass or silver dish, chill for an hour, and pour the syrup over just before it goes to the table so the fruit does not slump. Serves six as a dessert or a light salad course.
Fruit salads dressed with wine and sugar sat in an odd position on the American table around 1900, filed under salads but eaten as something between a course and a dessert. The composition is the tell: fruits kept in "separate piles" rather than tossed together belongs to the era of set-piece dinner service, where a dish was meant to be looked at before it was disturbed. The ingredient list also reads as a small inventory of what refrigerated rail transport and canning had recently made ordinary in northern cities — even oranges regardless of season, pineapple, bananas, and imported Madeira and maraschino to finish. Magazines of the period built much of their authority on presenting exactly this sort of aspirational but achievable table to middle-class households.