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Fruit Salad
Ingredients.
Half a pound of Lump Sugar.
Juice of half a Lemon.
A gill of Cold Water.
Fruit of any kind (Pine, Pears, Cherries, etc.).
Liqueur to flavour (Curaçao, Maraschino).
Boil sugar and water to a syrup. Skim, but do not stir. Add liqueur to taste. Prepare the fruit-cut up, stone, or skin, according to kind of fruit used. Add the boiling syrup to the fruit. Turn into a bowl to cool. When cool dish up in a glass or silver dish.
Note. Syrup requires to be boiled for about five minutes. -
A sugar syrup poured hot over cut fruit, flavoured with liqueur — the Victorian and Edwardian macédoine. Two things decide the result: the syrup must not be stirred, and the liqueur must not be boiled away.
- Do not stir the syrupStirring a boiling sugar solution drags undissolved crystals up the sides and seeds the whole pan, giving a grainy syrup. Swirl the pan if you must, skim the foam, and let it boil undisturbed for the five minutes the note specifies.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or a scant 2/3 US cup. With 8 oz sugar that gives a heavy syrup, but it thins as the fruit gives up juice.
- Lump sugarLoaf or cube sugar, chosen because it was the purest refined grade available and dissolved cleanly. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing now; use it by weight.
- "Pine"Pineapple. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will not harm a fruit salad but will stop a gelatine jelly setting.
- Add the liqueur lastThe recipe adds the Curacao or maraschino to the hot syrup once it has been boiled and skimmed. Left later still -- stirred in as the syrup cools, or into the bowl -- less of the aroma is lost to the steam.
- Hot syrup and soft fruitBoiling syrup suits firm pears, pineapple and stoned cherries, which it lightly poaches. Raspberries, strawberries and bananas collapse; add those raw to the cooled syrup instead.
Fruit salad in this form answers to the French macedoine, and the syrup-and-liqueur treatment is what separates it from a bowl of cut fruit. It belongs among the cold sweets of the last course, where its lightness set off the heavier creams and jellies -- and where its cost showed. Pineapple, out-of-season cherries and a bottle of Curacao or maraschino were not everyday purchases, and the instruction to dish up "in a glass or silver dish" makes plain that the salad was meant to be looked at. Maraschino is distilled from Dalmatian marasca cherries and Curacao flavoured with bitter orange peel; both were used for flavouring sweets as well as for drinking.