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Strawberry Salad
Arrange large ripe strawberries in a glass salad bowl, dust with powdered sugar and a little nutmeg. Pour over a dressing made of two tablespoons of sugar, a gill of sherry, a tablespoon of Maraschino, the juice of one lemon and two oranges; mix the fruit light with a fork and set on ice half an hour before serving.
A macerated strawberry dish filed under salads, in the era when sweetened fruit in a bowl counted as one. The only technical demands are timing and restraint with the nutmeg.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. With the lemon and orange juice added, the dressing comes to well over a cup of liquid, enough to pool at the bottom of the bowl rather than coat the fruit.
- MaraschinoThe clear cherry liqueur made from marasca cherries and their kernels (Luxardo and similar), not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries. The modern jar syrup will make the dressing cloying and pink.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works here; superfine dissolves without leaving a chalky film.
- Nutmeg"A little" should be taken literally — a few scrapes from a whole nutmeg over the whole bowl. Preground nutmeg in any quantity will dominate the strawberries.
- Thirty minutes, not longerThe half hour on ice is the working instruction. Strawberries in sugar and acid soften as they sit, and left much beyond that they slump and give up their juice.
- Mixing light with a forkFold from underneath two or three times only. Stirring bruises ripe berries and turns the dressing muddy.
- Berry choiceHull the berries but leave them whole; large ones can be halved. Firm, fully red fruit holds up, while soft supermarket berries picked underripe will not survive the maceration.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity of berries; the volume of dressing suits something like a quart, which would serve four to six as a light course or dessert. Serve in shallow glass dishes and spoon the liquid over, or strain it off and pass it separately.
- AlcoholThe sherry and liqueur are uncooked, so the alcohol remains. Worth knowing before serving it to children or anyone avoiding it.
Fruit "salads" of this kind sat comfortably in the salad chapters of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, where a salad was defined less by lettuce than by a dressing poured over something raw and served cold. The wine-and-liqueur treatment here is essentially the macération of French practice, and a similar formula seems to have been applied to peaches, pineapple and mixed fruit. Two details suggest a broad period: the reliance on a block-ice chest — "set on ice" rather than in a refrigerator — and the confidence that a household would keep both sherry and Maraschino on hand, which was ordinary in the decades before Prohibition and not at all ordinary after. The nutmeg is probably an older habit still, plausibly a survival of the English fondness for grating spice over sweetened fruit and cream.