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Fruit Macedoine
3 oranges 3 bananas 1 can sliced pineapple Powdered sugar Lemon juice Peel the oranges deep enough into the flesh to remove all the white skin. Slice into half-inch slices; then cut into small cubes. Drain the juice from a pint can of pineapples, and cut the slices into small triangular shaped pieces.
Peel the banana, and cut into half-inch cubes. Mix the fruits, and put into stemmed sherbet glasses. Pour over each serving about a teaspoon of lemon juice, also a teaspoon or more of powdered sugar.
A plain macédoine of three fruits, assembled rather than cooked. The only things needing translation are the sugar and the can size.
- Powdered sugarIn older American books this often meant a finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves into the juices cleanly; modern confectioners' sugar can go slightly pasty.
- A pint can of pineapple16 fl oz, somewhat smaller than the standard 20 oz (567 g) can of sliced pineapple sold today; one modern can, drained, is if anything slightly generous against three oranges and three bananas.
- Save the pineapple juiceThe recipe has you drain it and says nothing more. A few tablespoons reserved to toss the banana cubes in will help hold their colour, since the lemon juice here is not added until serving.
- Cutting the orangesPeeling deep enough to remove all the white pith is the instruction that matters. Any albedo left on turns bitter against the sugar. A knife rather than fingers, taking the peel off in a spiral, is the reliable way.
- Assemble lateCut fruit sitting in sugar draws water and slumps within an hour. Cube everything ahead if you like, but combine, sugar and glass it no more than twenty or thirty minutes before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; the quantities will fill about six modest sherbet glasses, or four generous ones. Chill the glasses if you can, as there is no other cooling step.
Macédoine is French kitchen vocabulary for a mixture of things cut to a uniform dice, the name generally traced to the ethnically mixed territory of Macedonia under Alexander. It applies equally to a savoury dice of vegetables and, as here, to a bowl of cut fruit. The dish is a fair marker of its moment: canned sliced pineapple, a Hawaiian and Southeast Asian product that reached American shelves cheaply in the early twentieth century, sits beside bananas that refrigerated shipping is often said to have turned from a luxury into a grocery staple. A fruit dessert did steady work, closing a meal on something that needed no stove.