Home › Salads of Meat, Fish, Vegetables and Fruit › Orange and Banana Salad
Orange and Banana Salad
Cut four large oranges in halves and scoop out the pulp, add to this four bananas cut in dice, pour over it the fruit syrup.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know two things: how to empty an orange without wrecking the shell, and what "the fruit syrup" refers to. Both are worth spelling out.
- The fruit syrupThe definite article implies the book gives the syrup elsewhere. In books of this period the term generally means a simple sugar syrup — roughly equal parts sugar and water boiled a few minutes, cooled, and often sharpened with lemon or orange juice; some versions add a spoonful of maraschino or sherry. Quantity is unstated; about half a cup for this amount of fruit is plenty.
- Emptying the shellsHalve the oranges across the equator, run a grapefruit knife or a small serrated blade around inside the rind, then lift the segments out in wedges with a spoon. Work over a bowl so the juice is caught, and scrape the shells clean of loose pith so they hold their shape as cups.
- Cut the membrane awayPulp scooped straight from the shell carries tough segment walls. Slipping each wedge free of its membrane takes a few minutes and is the difference between a salad that eats cleanly and one that is stringy.
- Bananas darkenDice the bananas last and toss them at once in the caught orange juice or a squeeze of lemon. Cut ahead of time they will begin to discolour quickly, and there is nothing in this dish to hide it.
- Chill, brieflyFill the shells and hold them in the refrigerator no more than an hour. Longer and the bananas soften into the syrup. Setting the shells in a shallow dish or on crumpled napkins keeps them from tipping.
- YieldFour oranges halved gives eight cups, so eight small servings or four generous ones. As written it is a dessert-leaning salad; a leaf of lettuce or watercress under each shell, as fruit salads of the period were often served, is what put it on the salad course.
Fruit served back in its own hollowed rind was a fixture of American entertaining around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period are full of oranges, grapefruit and melons used as edible dishes. The context matters: refrigerated rail cars and the growth of Florida and California citrus groves had turned oranges from a Christmas-stocking treat into something a middle-class household could buy through much of the year, while bananas arrived on steamers from Central America in volume from the 1880s onward. Placing the result under "Salads" rather than "Desserts" reflects a genuinely fluid category: a salad was expected to appear with a dressing of some kind, sweet or acid, on a lettuce leaf, somewhere near the end of a meal. The syrup here is doing the work a French dressing would do in a vegetable salad.