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Plum Salad
Into a glass salad bowl put one-half pint each of greengages, stoned and cut in half, bananas, peeled and cut in slices, and any other fresh fruit that is at hand.
Sprinkle well with powdered sugar, cover and let stand one hour, then add one wineglass of syrup of preserved cherries, one of lemon juice, and the greengage kernels, blanched and cut in half. Cover again and let stand until required. Serve with whipped cream and sponge fingers. The cream and fingers should not be put on the salad, but should be served separately.
A macerated fruit bowl of the sort that closed a summer dinner in the 1900s, but one instruction in it disqualifies the dish as written.
- The kernelsThe recipe calls for the greengage kernels — the seeds inside the stones — to be blanched, halved and stirred into the fruit. Plum kernels, like those of apricots, peaches and bitter almonds, contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is chewed or digested. Blanching loosens the skin; it does not remove the amygdalin. Half a pint of halved greengages yields a considerable number of stones, and the kernels here are eaten rather than infused and strained out.
- Why the period called for themNineteenth-century cooks used stone-fruit kernels for a bitter-almond perfume, and the practice turns up in Victorian and Edwardian dessert cookery. In ratafias and creams the kernels were commonly infused and strained out rather than eaten. Here they are eaten whole.
- Use a current recipeIf you want a macerated summer fruit bowl, work from a modern recipe rather than adapting this one.
- Half a pint of fruitFor reference when reading the original: a half pint here is a volume measure — a US cup, or 10 fl oz if the book is working in imperial measure — of prepared fruit.
- WineglassA wineglass in books of this period is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. "Syrup of preserved cherries" most likely means the heavy syrup drained from cherries preserved in syrup rather than a cordial, though the recipe does not say.
- Sponge fingersThese are ladyfingers, savoiardi in Italian shops. The recipe insists the cream and biscuits be served separately but does not say why; keeping the biscuits from going soft against the wet fruit is the obvious explanation.
Greengages are a green-skinned dessert plum, sweet enough to eat out of hand, and the English name is generally traced to Sir Thomas Gage, whose family is said to have introduced the French Reine Claude to England in the early eighteenth century. Their season is short and late in the summer, and this is a dish for the fortnight when the fruit is on the tree and nothing needs cooking. The construction is simple: fruit sugared and left to draw its own juice for an hour, sharpened with lemon and enriched with the syrup from a jar of preserved cherries, with the cream and biscuits served separately. The use of the stone kernels for an almond note was ordinary practice at the time and is the one element of the recipe that has not survived scrutiny.